Podcast appearances and mentions of steve spear

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and associated faculty member at Adriane Labs of the Harvard School of Public Health. Spear is also author of The High-Velocity Edge and Wiring the Winning Organization and principal of SeeToSolve. The conversation explores:  Stellar examples of product development innovation (and the learning cultures that made these achievements possible) What Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps, and more schools of systems thinking and management all have in common What business and product leaders across hardware and software can learn from each other Key ideas and core principles you should take away from his latest book  What kind of leadership Steve believes is needed now and what good leadership looks like in practice, given all of the organizational challenges companies face today

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Steve Spear, author of a High Velocity Edge, Wiring the Winning Organization and Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.   We discuss how good leaders create a system that makes it easy for people to do quality work when and where it's needed by continually asking, what's the problem and how can I help?   Steve explains how to use a developmental leadership approach with collaborative problem solving, workflow visualization and iterative improvement to become a high performing organization with an unbeatable competitive edge.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Deezer | Podcast Addict | Connect with Steve via LinkedIn or over at https://seetosolve.com/ or at https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/academic-groups/system-dynamics/about-us   Contact Shane on LinkedIn shagility or Murray via email  You can read the podcast transcript at: https://agiledata.io/podcast/no-nonsense-agile-podcast/high-performance-organisations-with-steve-spear/   The No Nonsense Agile Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

 Bio: Pete Newell Pete Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the  government and other large organizations compete and drive growth.  He is the CEO of BMNT, an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage tech accelerator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Founded in Silicon Valley, BMNT has offices in Palo Alto, Washington DC, Austin, London, and Canberra. BMNT uses a framework, called H4X®, to drive innovation at speed. H4X® is an adaptation of the problem curation techniques honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the best practices employed by successful Silicon Valley startups. The result is a disciplined, evidence-based, data-driven process for connecting innovation activities into an accountable system that delivers solutions and overcome obstacles to innovation. Pete is a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program taught at 47+ universities in the U.S., as well as universities in the UK and Australia. H4D® focuses on solving national security problems. It has in turned created a series of sister courses – Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Local and others – that use the H4X® framework to solve critical real-world problems while providing students with a platform to gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete continues to advise and teach the original H4D® course at Stanford University with Steve Blank. In addition, Pete is Co-Founder and Board Director of The Common Mission Project, the 501c3 non-profit responsible for creating an international network of mission-driven entrepreneurs, including through programs like H4D®. Prior to joining BMNT, Pete served as the Director of the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF).  Reporting directly to the senior leadership of the Army, he was charged with rapidly finding, integrating, and employing solutions to emerging problems faced by Soldiers on the battlefield. From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the REF in the investment of over $1.4B in efforts designed to counter the effects of improvised explosive devices, reduce small units exposure to suicide bombers and rocket attacks and to reduce their reliance on long resupply chains. He was responsible for the Army's first deployment of mobile manufacturing labs as well as the use of smart phones merged with tactical radio networks. Pete retired from the US Army as a Colonel in 2013. During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing special operations, combat, and peace support operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Army Ranger who has received numerous awards to include the Silver Star and Presidential Unit Citation. Pete holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS from the National Defense University and advanced certificates from the MIT Sloan School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Bio: Dr Alison Hawks Dr. Alison Hawks is one of the leading experts advancing public sector innovation. A researcher and academic-turned-entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and CEO of BMNT, Ltd., the innovation company that is changing how public sector innovation happens; and Chair of the Common Mission Project UK, BMNT's charitable partner that guides mission-driven entrepreneurial education in the UK. Dr. Hawks co-founded BMNT Ltd with (Ret) Col Pete Newell, the CEO of BMNT, Inc., in 2019 to bring BMNT's proven innovation approach to the UK market. Under her leadership BMNT has become a trusted innovation partner across all single Services of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and the national security community. She has also helped change how real-world government challenges are addressed in the UK, launching the “Hacking for” academic programmes created in the U.S. These courses that teach university students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques to solve problems alongside government at startup speed. As a result of her efforts, 14 UK universities are offering Hacking for the Ministry of Defence, Hacking for Sustainability and Hacking for Police. More than 480 students have taken these courses, addressing 103 real-world challenges. Dr. Hawks teaches mission-driven entrepreneurship at King's College London, Department of War Studies and at Imperial College London's Institute of Security Science and Technology. She was named the Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards in 2022. She serves on the Board of Directors of BMNT, leading development of BMNT's innovation education programs while also guiding the integration of BMNT's rapidly expanding international presence. She was previously Director of Research at the Section 809 Panel, a U.S. Congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was also an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, as well as King's College London, Department of Defence Studies where she taught strategy, policy and operations in professional military education. Dr. Hawks' doctoral thesis was in military sociology. She received her Ph.D from the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She has multiple peer reviewed publications on her research. Interview Highlights 03:50 BMNT 06:20 Serendipity 10:00 Saying yes to the uncomfortable 11:20 Leadership 15:00 Developing a thick skin 20:00 Lessons of an entrepreneur 22:00 Stakeholder success 25:00 Solving problems at speed and at scale 28:00 The innovation pipeline 29:30 Resistance is rational 34:00 Problem curation 38:00 Dual use investments 43:00 Accelerating change 47:00 AUKUS 52:20 AI   Contact Information   ·         LinkedIn: Ali Hawks on LinkedIn ·         LinkedIn Peter Newell on LinkedIn ·         Website:  The Common Mission Project UK ·         Website: BMNT US ·         Website: BMNT UK   Books & Resources ·         Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less: Robert Sutton, Robert , Huggy Rao ·         Value Proposition Canvas ·         Business Model Canvas ·         Hacking for Defense ·         Hacking for Allies ·         AUKUS DIN ·         Impromptu : Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman ·         Huberman Lab Podcast ·         Allie K. Miller ·         Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification: Gene Kim, Steven Spear ·         The Friction Project - Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao Episode Transcript  Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku My guests for this episode are Pete Newell and Ali Hawks. Pete Newell is the CEO and Co-founder of BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest problems facing the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. Ali Hawks is CEO of BMNT in the UK and also a Co-founder of BMNT in the UK. In addition to this, she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Common Mission Project, and she Co-founded the Common Mission Project in 2019 and drove its growth as a Startup charity in the UK. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Pete and Ali, I found it very insightful and I'm sure you would as well. Pete, thank you Ali, thank you so much for being with us on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here.  Pete Newell  Thanks so much for the invite.  Ali Hawks  Yeah. Thank you for having us.  Ula Ojiaku Right, this is the second time ever in the history of my podcast that I'm having two people, two guests. The first time was fun, and I know this one would be as well, and informative. I always start with asking my guests to tell us a bit about themselves. So your background, any memorable happenings that shaped you into the person you are today?  Pete Newell  So I'm a retired army officer. I enlisted when I was 18 and was commissioned when I left college in the mid 80s. I spent most of my career as an Infantryman in tactical units. I spent a great bit of time in the Middle East and other war zones. Towards the end of my career, I ended up as the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force, which is essentially the Skunk Works that was stood up at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to accelerate technology to solve problems that were emerging on the battlefield, that weren't part of something else, somewhere else. And in that three-year journey, it probably exposed me to first and foremost, the speed at which new problems are presenting themselves, not just on the battlefield, but in the rest of the world. It exposed me to the speed at which technology is changing, being adopted and then being adapted for other purposes. So it's almost like chasing technology as it changes is a whole new sport, and it exposed me to  the challenges of large bureaucratic organisations and their inability to keep up with the speed of the changes in order to remain competitive, whether it was on the battlefield or in the commercial markets or something like that. Those epiphanies really drove, first, my decision to retire from the military, because I became addicted to solving that problem, and second, drove the impetus to launch BMNT in 2013. And in fact, you are right square in the middle of our 10th anniversary of being a company. So it really is, I think, a big deal because we started with four people on a driveway in Palo Alto, California, now we're a global company with multiple companies and are grateful, but that's the history of how we got started.  Ula Ojiaku  Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, and it's an impressive background and story. Ali, what about you?  Ali Hawks  So, my background, a little bit different than Pete's, by training I was an academic, so my training and my PhD was in military sociology. I was really interested in understanding people's experiences in the armed forces, both in the US and the UK. That is what my PhD was focused around, my thesis, and I went on to be an academic at King's College London here in the UK. I've also been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. But it wasn't until I then took a job with the US DoD, in something called a Congressional Advisory Panel called the Section 809 Panel, which was tasked with overhauling all of defense acquisition, and that's where Pete and I met. I think one of those formative experiences in my career was meeting Pete and going to the non-profit that Pete started and spun out of BMNT, it's called the Common Mission Project with a really big program, Hacking for Defense, and Steve Blank also Co-founded that as you know, and Joe Felter. I went to an educator course for this program in Fort Belvoir as a part of my job to understand, could we take these types of methods and put them into congressional legislation or DoD regulation as a way to change how people think about problems? And when I met Pete, it was the intersection of all of the things that I really love, academia, entrepreneurship, defense and national security. I went up to Pete and pitched him and said, I want to take this back to the UK and launch it. That was the start of what has been thousands of conversations about the value that we can add both in the US and the UK.  I worked in some law firms before I did my Master's and my PhD, but mainly my career has been in academia.  Ula Ojiaku  Wow. Thanks for sharing. And would you say it was serendipity that made your paths to cross and how are you finding the journey so far?  Ali Hawks  I think, yes, I think it's serendipity. I have a really different life journey than Pete. And I think in my career at the time when I met Pete, I hadn't really found what it is, what I felt like my purpose should be, or hadn't really found passion or joy in my work to that day. I found things I loved, I loved academia and I love teaching, but it just still didn't hit all of those things that you kind of get up every day and are like, this is what I'm meant to do. And I had done a lot of work on reflecting of what that would feel like and what that would look like and the elements it had to have. So by the time I met Pete, it was almost as if someone was flashing a huge sign at me saying, don't miss your turn, this is your turn. So I think serendipity, but also really understanding what it is that I wanted to do and the type of people I wanted to work with and the journey so far. I'll hand over to Pete in a second, but it's been nothing short of incredible. Pete has an amazing reputation, but as a business partner and as a leader, he allows people to truly learn, experiment, make mistakes, and he pulls everyone along by building confidence and empowering people that work for him. So in terms of kind of coming from academia and becoming a researcher turned entrepreneur, it's been the most formative experience of my career. Being able to work along Pete is like being able to work alongside that kind of guide or that guru, and you're like, wow, I can't believe I get to talk to this person every week and learn from them and be in business with them. So that's how it's going for me. Pete, how's it going for you?  Pete Newell You know, Steve Blank and I had a long conversation about serendipity when he and I met 2015 and here's my advice in serendipity. It really is if you have an active curiosity and a willingness to say yes to things that you wouldn't normally, and you're not adverse to taking risk, the chances of serendipity smacking like lightning greatly go up. And then I go back to my first trip to Stanford University in 2011. Well, I was still a military officer and saying yes to a number of things that people asked me to do, and just one conversation after another led to a meeting with two guys who were Stanford graduate school instructors who were writing a book. Those two decided to write a chapter in that book about the work I was doing at the Rapid Equipment Force. Now, when Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton decided to write a book and hire a case study writer who spent six months digging into your life, you learn all kinds of things about yourself and about the world, and when that's followed by a chance coffee with Steve Blank, who had no idea who I was, and I had no idea who he was, that 15-minute coffee turned into a four-hour discussion between the two of us. I typically would not have been at the Fort Belvoir thing that Ali was at, and I think our meeting was very brief, but it was, I think, six months later when I found her in the library at Georgetown University at some social event and we both decided that we wanted her to do something, and we wanted to do something in the UK, and we wanted to see something between allied countries come together. There was no strategy or grand business development, there was nothing that drove those conversations. It was simply in the spur of the moment, the curiosity takes over and you start to say I can see where this might work. Now, Ali will be the first to tell you, it has not been easy, but it has been a privilege to work with her and to continue to work between the two governments and the countries to see absolutely brilliant things done. And so I just say, I come back to, it's that curiosity connected with the desire to, the willingness to accept a little bit of risk, but learning how to say yes to things that you're uncomfortable with and digging just a little bit more. That opens up that opportunity so much more.  Ula Ojiaku I could see, it's evident to me the way Ali was talking about working with you, Pete, and your leadership, I'm wondering, could there have been anything about your military background that has influenced your leadership style as a whole? Pete Newell Yeah, everything in my background does. I can tell you, even growing up as a kid that the way my parents raised me influenced me positively, and negatively in some cases. My military background, I have been fortunate to work for a group of fantastic military leaders, I spent time in the Special Operations community, I spent time working for Stan McChrystal, I spent time in the Pentagon working for brilliant people. I also worked for some of the absolute worst bosses in the entire world, and I rarely say this about people, they were just bad human beings, and I will tell you in many cases what I learned watching a leader in a just really horrible environment influenced me more than watching the really brilliant guys out there. If you think about it, it's really hard to pattern yourself after somebody who is brilliant and driven and successful and kind and they do all that, but I'll tell you what, you can look at somebody who is really a bad boss and say, I don't want to be like them, and it happens in an instant, that I do not ever want to be like that person. That teaches you a lot about the environment that you want to create that people are going to work in. I have some hard areas, and Ali will acknowledge some of them, in the way people are treated in the workplace. Also as a graduate of the Special Operations community, I have strong feelings about how high performing people should be allowed to perform, and also expectations of how they work. I think the military left me with a high degree of not just respect, but you want to hire people, there's a certain degree of dedication to their success, whether they stay in your company or whether they leave, or they go someplace else, whether they're challenged or something else. And I'll tell you, if there was something hard about transitioning from the military to the business world is, in the military, you're given people and you're told to make them successful no matter what. In the business world, you tend to just fire people who are unsuccessful and not invest time and energy in them. I have never been able to make that change, and it's a bit of a struggle sometimes, because in the business world, you can't afford to hang on to people who are subpar performers, if you want to run a high-performance organisation. So if there's one of the things that I have learned is I am challenged in letting somebody go because I see it as a personal failure if somebody fails to thrive in my organisation, that has been built and imprinted by my past. I think Ali has a very different opinion, because she comes from such a great different place. Here's the beauty of it, the work with people like Ali and some of the others, we can argue and disagree and fight like cats and dogs sometimes, but we still love each other, and it is still an absolutely amazing environment to work in. That's really what, if you get it right, that's what life's like.  Ula Ojiaku What's your view, Ali?  Ali Hawks So we clearly have different backgrounds, I think that I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of leadership style. Being in academia, you're not really in a leadership position because you're responsible for yourself, and in a way, it's a really good test bed for being an entrepreneur, because in academia you have to have such thick skin, because you turn in your peer reviewed journal publications, you turn in your papers and people write back and slash, and no one's trying to make you feel good. In fact, they want to help you, but also they're quite competitive. So that was a really good proving ground for being able to develop the thick skin for critical feedback or any feedback and really all of the knocks that come with being an entrepreneur. What I took into starting BMNT here four years ago was, things that I took from Pete and from the U.S. was really allowing people and high performers to work in the way that they feel best. One of the things I hated when I was younger in certain jobs, and working in law firms is punching your time card at 8 am, and you punch out at 5, and an hour for lunch, and it never felt right that that was the way to measure someone's productivity or to really enhance or empower people. And so the way that I approach it is we consider everyone to be an adult and to do their job, and also to be as curious as possible. So on our Standup this morning, with two new team members coming back into BMNT, one of the things that we agreed on is if no one's asking for time off to be creative or to have a day or two days to read a book that will enhance their knowledge or make them a better BMNTer, then we're failing. If no one has asked for that time by the end of this calendar year. So the way that I really approach leadership is how can I empower, but also invest in every single person, because it's not me delivering the everyday work, it's the people in my company, so they're building it alongside of me. I hire smart young people who will give feedback and we action that feedback. So we change things based on what we get from a 23-year-old, so everyone in the company feels really valued. And I think, learning from Pete, is also being really honest and transparent with everyone in the company when your chips are down and you have to say, guys, this is what's going on, and I found it has built such a strong cohesion in the team that we have now, that this year going into it is the most excited I've ever been about running BMNT. So taking a lot of what I learned from Pete and also my own experiences of feeling really caged, actually, in most of my jobs, and being able to understand that people work in very different ways, and if you allow them to work in the ways that are best for them, you really do get the best of everyone.  Ula Ojiaku That's very inspiring and insightful. Now, there was something Pete said earlier on about you, Ali, walking up to him and sharing the vision that you wanted to take back what BMNT is doing to the UK and so what made you go for it, what pushed you towards that? Ali Hawks Again, it was a lot of work on my part of really understanding what I wanted to do, and when I approached Pete that day, I was really excited and exuberant and I said, I want to take this back to the UK and I want to run it. And Pete is, as you get to know him, he's very calm and he's quiet, and he kind of looked at me and he said, you should talk to some people. And I thought, okay, I'll go talk to people. So I went out and I talked to people and I got Pete on the phone a few weeks later and I said, Pete, this is my dream job, this is what I want to do. And Pete said, prove it, do a Business Model Canvas. So I then hung up the phone, I googled Business Model Canvas, I watched YouTube videos on how to complete it. I was still working at the 809 Panel, so I was getting up really early to talk to people back in the UK, make phone calls, pulling on all of my contacts because I've been in defense and national security for gosh, since 2009, and I was canvassing everyone I knew, I filled out the Business Model Canvas, I sent it to Pete, he was going to be in DC about a week later, and he wrote back saying we should meet. So we then met and had an initial conversation around what it could look like, but it really wasn't until as Pete said in that library at Georgetown for a reception that we came together and having had both time to think and think about what I put down in the Business Model Canvas, but also how we got along, I think, and gelled as business partners, we decided, let's do it. So when we said we didn't have a plan, I had an idea of what we could do, and I have unfailing determination to make things work, and so I just knew, and I think we both knew if we tried it, that something would come of it, and if not, we would learn a lot from it. So we went from there and it took a while before we got a plan, to be honest, but we got there. Ula Ojiaku Well, here you are. Ali Hawks Exactly. Pete Newell You know, if there's one thing I have learned as an entrepreneur is that the plan you thought you were going to have, is never the one you actually execute. So the faster you begin to test it, usually by talking to people and doing things, the faster you will get rid of bad ideas. And it's not about finding the good idea, but it's about creating all the ideas you could possibly have and then killing them off quickly so that you understand the core of the value that you think you're going to deliver. Everything after that is the mechanics of how to build a business. I mean, that's not easy stuff, when you're launching a company, more importantly when you're launching one in a country you haven't been in in a while, but getting there is really about getting the thought process moving and getting people to disabuse you of the notion that every idea you have is brilliant. Ula Ojiaku I mean, I agree setting up a business isn't easy. I can't imagine the additional challenge of setting it up in the defense sector, the Department of Defense in the US, Ministry of Defence here in the UK. What sort of things would you say would be the additional? Do you have to go through hurdles to go through approvals, clearances and all that? Ali Hawks From the MOD experience, it's less about clearances and those types of things, it's more about understanding, winding your way through what feels like a maze, to find the right stakeholders that you can bring together at the right time to make a decision. So while there are individuals that hold budgets and can make decisions, there's a constellation of people around them that need to be aligned in concert with that decision. If you went to a business, of course, you'll have to have a couple of people on board, but the time to sale or the cost to sale is relatively straightforward. When you go into the government, you have a group of highly motivated people, highly mission-driven people who experience the pain of their problems every day, and they are trying to fight just as hard as you are in order to change something for the better. So in the first instance, you have great allyship with your customers, because you have a shared mission, and you're both working towards it, which is fantastic. The second is really trying to understand if that person has the budget and they need to sign off on it, how much do they need to care about it, or is it their chief of staff that needs to really care about it? Or is it their engineer? So I would say the difference is the amount of discovery that you do and doing that stakeholder mapping, is fundamental to success, but also knowing that people change jobs in the civil service and the Armed Forces every few years, that is a critical skill as a business working with the government, that stakeholder mapping and that discovery with your customers, customer development never ends. So I think that that is the longest pole in the tent in terms of finding the right people, and sometimes people say that's the person that has authority, you go talk to them and they say, no, I don't have any authority, so it's really trying to wind your way through the maze to align those key stakeholders. Pete Newell I would add to what Ali said, is that it's like climbing into a very complicated Swiss watch and you need to understand not just how things work, but you need to understand why they work the way they do, and how they work with other things, and then you need to understand who's responsible for making them work and who the beneficiary of the work is, and who possibly might want to make them not work. So, Ali's comment on stakeholder development, it's at the heart of everything you do -- you talk about more sociology and anthropology than it is anything, it truly is understanding why things work the way they do and what drives people to behave one way versus another. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to motivate them to behave one way or another, and where you might fit to help them in their daily job or whatever else. But that stakeholder development and understanding who's in charge, who benefits, who doesn't benefit, why something might be counter to something else is so critical in any consulting business, but in particular, if you are trying to get something done inside a government organisation. It, in many cases, it's archaic, but it still operates underneath a very definitive culture that you can map if you've been at it long. Ula Ojiaku So BMNT, you help government organisations to solve hard problems at speed and at scale. Can you expand on this? Pete Newell It's both I think. I go back to my experience, way back in the Rapid Equipping Force and 2010 is first and foremost, there are tens of thousands of problems that prevent the government from doing what it wants to do. The government is challenged, first, in being able to identify those problems; second, in translating those problems into plain English that other people might understand; third, in using that translated thing to find ever bigger groups of people, to then redefine the problem one more time, so that it makes sense for the rest of the world; and fourth, creating the policies and process that will attract people to come to them and work with them to solve those problems fast enough to build a solution before the problem changes so much that the calculus is completely out of whack again. And in all this there's a complicated long answer, but the impedance difference between the speed at which you develop and acknowledge a problem and your ability to get people to work on it, if it's out of sync with the speed at which technology is being adopted and adapted, you will constantly be perfectly solving the wrong problem, and you'll be constantly delivering things that are antiquated before the day they land in somebody's hands, so that's really the speed issue. I go back to what I said about sociology. This is the speed of your ability to get people to come together to work on something, and then the scale is determining, scale how fast, and scale how big. The scale how fast is, I can start to deliver a solution to this, but I know the solution is going to change every 6 months. So I don't need to commit to building tens of thousands of these over a 5-year contract, but I do need to commit to changing what I deliver every 6 months, or this is going to scale to some big end and it goes into a much different system, you have to be ambidextrous about your approach to scale, and unfortunately most procurement laws, both the United States and in the UK are not built to be ambidextrous. They're built to do one thing and one thing very efficiently only. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works anymore. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks As Pete said, and as a sociologist, the most often thing, and I think Pete said this a long time ago when we first met, is the government doesn't have a tech adoption problem, it has a people problem, and a lot of our work, a lot of our customers will come and say they have a tech problem, and they have a huge degree of urgency, but the things that get in their way are they have no common language, and they have no repeatable and scalable process in which to think about and work on their problems. And the framework that we developed, the innovation pipeline, is that process for them to do it. It's not complicated, it's methodology agnostic, and so it allows you to develop an entire workforce around a common language of innovating, mission acceleration, agile transformation, whatever you want to do, recognising that people are at the heart of it. The Head of Innovation at UC Berkeley and during one of our Lean Innovators Summit, said something that has stuck with me for several years now, ad he said, and it really hit home with our customers, because sometimes when I first started BMNT here, I was such an evangelist that I forgot to listen to the customer. I was just so convinced that they needed what we had, and I think the customer was telling me something else and I would get frustrated, and when I heard this, it was resistance is rational. When we go into a room with a group of people, we usually have a customer who is an evangelist of ours, or an early adopter, a huge supporter, and they have a couple of other people who feel the same way they do about change and innovation and moving rapidly, and then 70 percent of the team don't feel that same way. So approaching it and really empathising with the customers and understanding resistance is rational, why would they want to change? Things for them work, the way that they have always done, it works, and that is a rational response. So being able to then develop a service where you're connecting with them and saying, I understand that, and that's a rational response, and then using tools, like one of my favourite tools, the Value Proposition Canvas, to really understand, what are the jobs to be done, and the pains and the gains, and when you speak in that type of language, there are so many times that I have seen this kind of aha moment of like, oh, so if I did that, then I wouldn't have to do this anymore, or I would be able to do this different thing. And this is not complicated, these are not complicated tools or processes we're talking about, but the common denominators of it are discipline, consistency, and hard work. And I think, coming off what Pete said, when you want to get pace and speed, you have to be consistent and you have to be disciplined, and people have to understand what you're saying in order to get over that resistance is rational piece. Pete Newell I think Ali's spot on in terms of the problem with the problem. Oftentimes is, we can put a problem in a room and 10 people work on it and get 10 different versions of the problem, and so part of the art that's involved in the process is to get a group of people to agree to a common definition of a problem and use the same words, because many times we're inventing new words. It's new technology, new problem, but the first thing we do is get everybody to say the same thing the same way, and then start to talk to other people about it, because part two of that is you learn that your problem is probably not the right problem, it's a symptom of something else, and that whole process of discovery is a very disciplined, I would say it's a scientific methodology applied to how we communicate with people. You have to get out and test your theory by talking to the right people in a big enough diverse crowd to truly understand that whether you're on the right track or the wrong track. That's hard work, it really is hard work, and it's even harder to get what I would say critical feedback from people in the process who will challenge your assumptions and will challenge your test, who will challenge the outcomes of that. That's what our team does such a great job of, working with customers to teach them how to do that, but listening to them and helping them come together. At the same time, we're looking at the quality of the work and because we're a third party, we can look over the shoulder and say I see the test, and I see the outcome, but I don't think your test was adequate, or I don't think you tested this in an environment that was diverse enough, that you may be headed down the wrong path. The customer can still decide to go with what they learn, but in most cases, at least they're getting honest feedback that should allow them to pause and relook something. Ali Hawks I think for this particular reason, this is why BMNT is a leader in this space, is because the kind of jurisdiction around that front end of the pipeline, of are we making sure that we're choosing from enough problems and we're not stuck with a couple of investments that might be bad, so to speak, really validating that problem to decide, is it worth working on, is this even progressible, does anyone care about it, can it technically be done, does the organisation care about it, before spending any money on investment. Now that front end of the pipeline is gradually becoming a stronger muscle, and I'll speak for the UK, is gradually becoming a stronger muscle because of the work that BMNT has done, and both in the US and the UK, there is incredibly strong muscle memory around experimentation and incubation, which is fantastic. There's a lot of structure around that and frameworks and a lot of common language, which is amazing, because when you have that developed, going back to the beginning to refine before you put into the machine, so to speak, that's where what we call curation, really validating that problem, that's a single most determining factor on whether a problem will transition to an adopted solution. Most of government starts in experimentation and incubation, so they don't get the benefit of de-risking investment in a solution, and they don't necessarily get the benefit of all the learning to expedite that into incubation and experimentation. So I think where BMNT comes out and really owns that area is in that front end of the pipeline, and when you do that front end, you would be amazed at how fast the other part of the pipeline goes through discover incubation experimentation, because you've increased confidence and really de-risked investment in the solution. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that Ali, would you say you're applying lean innovation amongst other things to the framework you're referring to, or would that be something else? Pete Newell No, I think that it's all part of the process. We use a variety of tools to get to the data we want, and then it's a matter of doing analysis, and this is why Ali's background as an academic is so critical, because she's keen on analysis, and looking at the data and not skewing the data one way or another, and that's an incredibly important skill in this process. Again, this is really the application of a scientific methodology, and you need to be able to do that, but you need to understand how to get the data. So whether it's Lean or it's Scrum or it's some Google tool or something else. We have become really adaptive in the use of the tools and a mixture of the tools to drive a community of people to create the data we need to make an assessment of whether something's going the right direction or not. And that's the beauty of being involved with the Lean Innovation Educators Forum, the beauty of the time we spend with folks like Alex Osterwalder or with Steve Blank or with the folks from the d.school at Stanford or any of those places that are developing tools. It is understanding how to use and adopt the tool to fit the circumstances, but at the end of the day, it's all about creating the data you need to use the analysis that will drive an insight, that will allow you to make a decision. Too often I find people who are just overly enamoured with the tool and they forget that the tool is just a tool. It's about data, insight, and decisions, and you have to get to a decision at some point. Ula Ojiaku Data, insight, decisions. Amazing. So, if we shift gears a little bit and go into your Strategic Innovation Project, SIP, I understand that one of the shifts you're driving in the DoD and MoD respectively is about their approach to involving private investment in defence technology. Could you share a bit more about that? Pete Newell As part of the innovation pipeline, you have to eventually transition out of the discovery phase and at the end of discovery, you should know that you have the right problem. You have a potential solution and you have a potential pathway that will allow you to deliver that solution in time to actually have an impact on the problem. At that point, you start incubating that solution, and if it's a tech or a product, then you're talking about either helping a company build the right thing, or you're talking about starting a new company, and that new company will have to do the thing. Our work in terms of early-stage tech acceleration is really now focused on what we call dual-use technologies. Those technologies that are required to solve a problem in the military, but also have a digital twin in the commercial world. There has to be a commercial reason for the company being built that's actually going to solve the problem, and so as we looked at that, we found really interesting conversations with investors in the United States and then eventually overseas who were looking for a way to help defense get the technologies it wanted, but have portfolios that don't allow them to just invest in a defense technology, and they were looking for an opportunity to engage one, with like-minded investors, but two, in honest conversations about problems that existed in the military and in the commercial world so they can make better decisions about the deployment of their capital to create the right companies. I think it's probably been five years now we've been working on the hypothesis around this. we started to develop a very strong language around dual-use investments in early-stage tech acceleration and adoption, and we started to build new tools inside government programs, as well as new groups of investors and other folks who wanted to be involved. All that was fine in the United States, but then we found it was a slightly different application outside the United States, particularly in Europe, which is not necessarily the most Startup friendly environment in the world in terms of investment, but at the same time, understanding that the United States has an unequalled appetite for technology to the point where that technology doesn't necessarily exist within the United States, nor do the best opportunities to test that technology exist for the United States, so we had to come up with a way that would allow us to do the same type of investigation with our allies, which turns into this incredible opportunity amongst allied nations and companies and vendors and things like that. And I know that from Ali's standpoint, watching NATO DIANA and other programs start, that it is more challenging, it's a different environment in Europe than it is in the United States. Ali Hawks Picking up there and in terms of the way that we think about investment, and what Pete is talking about is a program we run called Hacking 4 Allies. We currently work with Norway and take dual-use Norwegian Startups into our incubator and accelerator called H4XLabs in the US and we help them enter the US defense market and the commercial market, and one of the things that we're starting to see over here is it is a pathway that doesn't really exist in Europe. So when we think about NATO's DIANA, what DIANA is focused on, which is dual-use and deep tech and what they are overly focused on, and I think is correct, is how do you raise investment in the countries themselves to help booster a whole range of effects around being able to raise money within the country? Ultimately, though, and a lot of what DIANA was doing, in terms of the concept and its focus on dual-use and deep tech, was before the invasion of Ukraine, and so at that time before that, I think in terms of the NATO Innovation Fund and thinking about investment and NATO, it wasn't as comfortable with dual-use and investing in dual-use as the US is, not only is the US comfortable, but you have things like we helped a private capital fund, where people feel a great deal of patriotism, or that it's a part of their service to be able to contribute in that way. That feeling doesn't exist, it exists here, but it manifests itself in a different way, and it doesn't manifest itself as let's invest in dual-use technologies to help our defense and national security. So there's different understandings and cultural feelings towards those things. Now, having had the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in Israel and Gaza and now in Yemen, I think that the change is accelerating, insofar as what are the capabilities that we need to rapidly develop within NATO to be able to feel secure on our borders, and what type of investment does that take? Now, US investment in Europe has dropped about 22 percent in 2023, and so they're a little bit nervous about investing in these companies, and so the strength that being able to change the investment paradigm, which is ultimately, the companies that are going to receive the investment from the NATO Innovation Fund and NATO DIANA, they want to develop in the country, but ultimately all of those companies and their investors want them to get to a bigger market, and that bigger market is the US. So, what we are able to do is to connect real dollars, government dollars and commercial dollars, to those companies. We are one of the only pathways outside of export regimes for the Department of International Trade here in the UK. We are one of the only private pathways that has not only been tested and proved, but that we are able to take more companies year on year, take them to the US and prove that model. Now that's really exciting, especially as we see some of the investment declining, because we're able to identify those companies, we're able to connect them to problems that matter that people are trying to solve, develop the use cases, and then help them on the commercialisation side of things in terms of going into a new market. I think that the way that we think about investment in the US from a BMNT perspective, and the US is a little bit different from Europe and the UK, but the exciting thing is now that we have this proven pathway to enhance and accelerate concepts like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund. Ula Ojiaku So it sounds to me like it's not just about the localised investment into the innovation, it's also about BMNT building pathways, so European Startups, for example, that want an inroad into the US, maybe vice versa. Pete Newell I think the AUKUS DIN, the Defense Investor Network really is the collection of the US Investor Network, the UK and Australia. All three countries had Defense Investor Networks that had been set up over the last several years and primarily focused on, one, allowing investors to engage other investors about topics that are of common interest when it comes to this dual-use paradigm; and two, being able to engage with people in the government about things the investors were concerned about. I'm very clear when I talk about the Defense Investor Network, it is about defense investors, not about the government's problem. I've had to redefine that multiple times, as this is about enabling investors to be more proactive and participate in building the right kinds of companies, not about the government telling investors what they need to do, or the government telling the investors how they need to do it. It really, it was built from the investor perspective, and then we found is that the investors were prolifically honest about their feedback to senior people in the government, which I think has been hard for people in the government to get that kind of feedback, but when an investor with a portfolio of 30 and 40 companies looks at the government and says, I will never do it the way you just described, and here's why. Until you change that quantity, it makes no sense for us to participate, invest in, do, you'd be amazed. Sometimes it is the first time somebody's been able to articulate why something isn't going to happen, and then people nod their heads, well, I'll quit asking for that, or I'll go back and change something to see what it is we can do. So, we went from Hacking 4 Allies, which started out as a BMNT program with the Norwegians, to Hacking 4 Allies with the UK, Australia, Norway. At the same time, we had set up the Defense Investor Network, but as soon as we started the Allies program in the UK, the UK-based investors raised their hands and said, what you're doing in the United States, we want to do here, and then the same thing happened in Australia. When they made the AUKUS announcement, it just made too much sense to be able to look at, if we really want a free flow of technology and problems across the AUKUS governments, then surely we should be building ecosystems of like-minded people who can help drive those conversations. So it was super, super easy to bring the AUKUS Investor Network together, it was just too easy. The part that I think is not so easy, but we need to do work on is we, those investors need to be fed problems that are of an AUKUS nature, and at the same time, the governments need to listen to the investors when they tell them they have problems investing in companies that aren't allowed to participate in exercise or training or contracting or acquisitions in a different country, and if you really want to make AUKUS a real thing, there are a lot of policies that have to change. There's been a lot of progress made, but I think there's a lot more left to do to, to really get the opportunity to happen. Ula Ojiaku And would you say some of the problems would be related to what government officials would call national security, because if it's a dual-use spec, whilst it has its secular or commercial use, in the military, you wouldn't want other people knowing how you're deploying that technology and the ins and outs of it. So could that be one of the issues here? Pete Newell My definition of national security really touches public safety all the way up to military, so it's both. I think if you dig into it, it touches everything from supply chain, to access, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to education and workforce development, and you name it. There's a paradigm shift that has to happen if we're going to build more things, more often rather than long term ships and things like that, that as allied nations, we have to be able to attack all of the underlying foundational problems, and that's my supply chain, raw materials, manufacturing, and workforce that's necessary for the future. No one country is going to get that fixed all by themselves, and I think, to me, that's the absolute brilliance of what AUKUS should be able to focus on. Ali Hawks I agree, and I think that to being able to co-invest as well, the opportunity for investors to come around and understand what are the opportunities to, not only co-invest and coordinate, but to be able to scan their companies and their deal flow to see where their companies can partner and secure greater work and contracts and scale. So I think that it's a really important initiative in terms of being a steward of an extremely important ecosystem, not only being a steward, but being able to build that ecosystem of support and development. How we look at national security in the UK is really no different than what Pete talked about, and when we think about working with companies and the willingness to work with big tech companies or small tech companies or whatever it is, it's not just simply one transaction where, here's the money and here's your software. So obviously the kind of employment and the skills, but what is the ecosystem around that technology that is necessary? Does it require sensors and chips, and what is it that it requires that's going to bring in multiple different industries to support it, and that's really what the agenda here around prosperity is. How do we invest in these types of technologies and their ecosystems around it to have a more prosperous Britain? So you have a wider spread of skills as opposed to just investing in one thing. I think that's where AUKUS brings three very important allies together to be able to do that individually, but then the option to do it across in terms of the broader strategy and the policy around AUKUS, is a once in a lifetime chance that I think has come up. Ula Ojiaku So I think the key thing here is, this is a space to be watched, there's lots of opportunity and the potential of having the sum being greater than the parts is really huge here. One last question on this topic. So you said deep tech, and with Open AI's launch of ChatGPT earlier on last year, the world seems to have woken up to, generative AI. Do you see any influence this trend would have, or is having, in the military space in the Defense Innovation space. Pete Newell I think the world has woken up and is staring into the sun and is blinded. The challenge with AI in general, and I would say that it's not the challenge, AI has a long way to go, and by and large, folks are really focused on the high end of what AI can do, but people have to learn how to use AI and AI has to learn. What we're not doing is using AI to solve the mundane, boring, time wasting problems that are preventing our workforce from doing the high end work that only a human being can do, and I don't care how many billions of dollars we're pouring into building robots and other things, it's all great, but we still have government people managing spreadsheets of data that, they become data janitors, not analysts, and it is particularly bad in the intelligence world. I quote the Chief Information Officer of a large logistics agency who said data is not a problem, we have tons of data, it's just crappy, it's not tagged, it's not usable, we have data going back to the 1950s, we have no means of getting that data tagged so it's useful. Now, if we put time and energy into building AI products that would correctly tag old data, it'd be amazing what we can do. In the cases that we have helped develop tools with our clients, they'll save anywhere from a million to 300 million dollars a year in finding discrepancies in supply chain stuff, or finding other issues. So imagine if we put that kind of work in place for other people, but free people up to do more, better, smarter things, how much more efficient the use of the government's time and money would be, so that that money and that time could be invested in better things. So when I say, yeah, the AI is out there and people's eyes are open, but they're staring into the sun. They're not looking at the ground in front of them and solving the things that they could be solving at the speed they should be doing it, and unfortunately, I think they're creating a gap where legacy systems are being left further and further behind, but those legacy systems, whether it's finance, personnel, supply chain, discipline, things like that, aren't going to be able to make the transition to actually be useful later on. So I would describe it as an impending train wreck. Ula Ojiaku And what would be, in your view, something that could avert this oncoming train wreck. Pete Newell I think a concerted effort, really just to have the government say we're going to use AI to get rid of as much of the legacy brute force work that our populations are doing so that we can free them up to do other things. Part of this is we're then going to take the money we save and channel that money back into investment in those organisations. Right now, the money just goes away, that's great, you did better, therefore, your budget's reduced. There's no incentive to get better that way, but if you look at an organisation and say, you know, if you can save 10 million dollars a year, we'll give you that 10 million dollars to reinvest back into your organisation to do better and something else. Now, you have some incentive to actually make change happen. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks I think the exciting thing for us, the way that I look at it in terms of government is that that government enablement to be able to use AI, here they are building large language models for the government based on the data that they have, and there's a lot of excitement around it and there should be. It's a pretty exciting thing to do. I think where we're in a really strong position and what I find really exciting is being able to do what we do best, which is help them understand what is the query and how do you validate that query? So what are the basic skills that you need to be able to interact, and then to be able to retain the skills of critical analysis, so when the answer comes back, you do not take that as the end all be all. It is a tool. So within your decision-making process, it's decreasing the amount of time it takes you to gather a certain amount of information, but just as you would if you were doing a book report, you still have to validate the sources and understanding, and you have to apply your own judgment and your own experience to that packet of information, which is what we all do every day, but it's not really thought about that way. So I think that the way that people are looking at it here is it will be able give us the decision and it will be able to kind of do our job for us, and for some tools, yes, and I completely agree that we need to free up all of the mundane work that hoovers up the time of civil servants here, because it's extraordinary how they're bogged down, and it completely disempowers them and it contributes to low retention rates and recruitment rates. But I think also it's developing the muscle to be able to do that critical thinking in order to leverage human intelligence to engage with artificial intelligence. And I think that's where we are uniquely positioned to do that because that is the bulk of our work on the front end of the pipeline, which is how are you going to validate what you know, how are you going to get the problem statement in order to query what you need to query and then having the judgment and the analysis to be able to look at that answer and make a decision, based on your own human intellect. That's where I see it playing here. I completely agree with Pete, we have people looking into the sun being like LLMs and they're going to solve everything, but you sit, let's say a hundred people down in front of an LLM and tell me how many people know what to ask it, or how to use it and integrate it into their everyday workflow. There's a long way to go, but I feel really excited about it because I feel like we have something so incredible to offer them to be able to enhance their engagement with AI. Ula Ojiaku That sounds excellent, thank you. Just to go to the rapid fire questions. So, Ali, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most? Ali Hawks So I don't read a lot of work books, in terms of like how to run a company or anything like that, sorry, Pete, but, and I have a 4-year-old and three stepchildren, so I don't actually read as much as I used to, but I have read over in the last few weeks, the book Impromptu by Reid Hoffman about AI, which is great, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commute into London, so the Huberman Lab podcast I listen to a lot, but if you're looking for workplace inspiration, I'm afraid I look at Instagram, listen to podcasts, and then I follow Allie K. Miller, who writes a lot about AI, came out of Amazon, and she is fantastic for breaking things down into really bite sized chunks if you're trying to learn about AI, if you don't come from a technical background. Ula Ojiaku Thanks, Ali, we'll put these in the show notes. And Pete, what about you? Pete Newell I will give you two new books. One of them is a fun one, Wiring the Winning Organization written by Gene Kim and Steven Spear. Steve Spear is a good friend of ours, he's been a great mentor and advisor inside BMNT for a long time, I've known Steve since way back in my early days. The other one is by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton, and it's called The Friction Project, and it's just like you say, it's all about friction in the workplace. I think both of those books tend to lend themselves to how to drive performance in organisations, and I think, knowing all of the authors, that they are phenomenal books, but I think the experience the four of them bring to the dialogue and the discussion of what the future workplace needs to look like and the things we need to solve will all be buried in those books. In terms of podcasts, I'm all over the map, I chase all kinds of things that I don't know. I listen to podcasts about subjects that I'm clueless about that just spark my interest, so I wouldn't venture to pick any one of them except yours, and to make sure that people listen to yours. Ula Ojiaku You're very kind, Pete. Well, because you're on it, they definitely would. Would you both be thinking about writing a book sometime, because I think your story has been fascinating and there are lots of lessons Pete Newell Only if Ali would lead it. So I have picked up and put down multiple proposals to write books around the innovation process within the government and other places, and part of the reason I keep stopping is it keeps changing. I don't think we're done learning yet, and I think the problem writing a book is you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the things that we are very focused on for the military, we talk about doctrine, what is the language of innovation inside the government workplace? It's the thing that we keep picking up, we've helped at least one government organisation write their very first innovation doctrine, the Transportation Security Administration of all places, the very first federal agency to produce a doctrine for innovation that explains what it is, why it is connected to the mission of the organisation, and describes a process by which they'll do it. I think within the Ministry of Defence, Department of Defense, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce a document that connects the outcome of innovation to the mission of the organisation. We call that mission acceleration. We look at innovation as a process, not an end state. The end state is actually mission acceleration. There's probably a really interesting book just to be written about Ali's journey, and I say more Ali's journey than mine because I think as a woman founder of a defence company in the UK, all of the characters in the book are completely unlikely. So somewhere down the road, maybe. Ula Ojiaku Well, I'm on the queue waiting for it, I will definitely buy it. So where can the listeners and viewers find you if, if they want to get in touch? Ali Hawks We're both on LinkedIn, so Pete Newell, Ali Hawks, our emails too are on our various websites, bmnt.com, bmnt.co.uk. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Any final words for the audience? Pete Newell I'll say thank you again for one, having us. Like I said, it's the first opportunity Ali and I have had to be on a podcast together. Any opportunity I get to engage with the folks and have this conversation is a gift. So thank you for giving us the time. Ula Ojiaku My pleasure. Ali Hawks Yes, Ula, thanks very much for having us on together. It's been great. Ula Ojiaku I've enjoyed this conversation and listening to you both. So thank you so much. The pleasure and the honour is mine. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Blog post I love Steve Spear‘s emphasis on a Toyota-based Lean model of: “See, Solve, Share” See problems, solve problems, and share what worked as countermeasures. That's the ideal, and it's powerful where it exists. At Toyota, and companies like it, there's an understanding that speaking up about problems leads to a constructive response from leaders.  That's not always true at other companies that are starting or attempting their “Lean Journey.” The Psychological Safety that might be taken for granted at Toyota must be actively cultivated in a company before continuous improvement can really take root, let alone take off. I think the model could also be stated as: “See, Share, Solve, Share” --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lean-blog-audio/support

“I have never regretted having too much data when collecting a sample.” - Trace Blackmore In this insightful episode of Scaling UP! H2O, join your host Trace Blackmore as he helps water professionals scale up their water testing knowledge, addressing listener questions and providing invaluable expertise for water treatment professionals. Water testing stands as a cornerstone of effective water treatment, and Trace serves as your guide through this vital terrain. With a wealth of expertise, he addresses listener questions, offering invaluable insights to elevate the practices of water treatment professionals. Trace's guidance spans essential topics, from analyzing water samples to deciphering past data and ensuring the precision of collected samples. His pragmatic approach unveils indispensable tips for securing quality samples, choosing suitable tests for labs, and mastering sample preparation techniques. Listeners will find clarity on concepts such as grab and composite samples, quantitative versus qualitative analysis, and the pivotal role of lab procedures in securing accurate results. Trace's exploration extends to the comparison between tests conducted with test kits versus labs, alongside illuminating insights into specialized tests like Legionella testing and titration manipulation. Through engaging dialogue and expert advice, Trace underscores the significance of meticulous data collection and adherence to lab protocols. This episode serves as a catalyst for water professionals, empowering them to refine their testing methodologies and optimize water treatment strategies. Join Trace Blackmore on this enlightening expedition into the realm of water testing, where every lesson learned enhances practical expertise, and every insight gained fuels professional growth. Tune in to Scaling UP! H2O, and let's scale up our knowledge together.   Timestamps 01:00 - Upcoming Events for Water Treatment Professionals  08:00 - Trace Blackmore answers listener questions about Testing on this informative Pinks and Blues episode  40:00 - Drop by Drop With James McDonald    Quotes “It's not just collecting samples, it's about collecting data around those samples. I always take a picture of what I'm taking the scale off of and what is around it. I reference the photos so that when I get the report back, I can do more analysis.” - Trace Blackmore “I have never regretted having too much data when collecting a sample.” - Trace Blackmore “Collect all the data that you can, when you can.” - Trace Blackmore “Learn what your lab needs from you before sending them your samples, and follow your lab's procedures. The procedures are there to help you.” - Trace Blackmore   Connect with Scaling UP! H2O Email Producer: corrine@blackmore-enterprises.com Submit a show idea: Submit a Show Idea LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/traceblackmore/ YouTube: @ScalingUpH2O   Links Mentioned Global 6K for Water 244 The One About Water Treaters For Clean Water (with Steve Spear) 294 The One About Getting Involved so the Profession Can Grow (with John A. Mullen) 348 Credentials and Codes: Plumbing Strategies Against Legionella (with Christoph Lohr) Blackmore Enterprises, Inc. Testing Services Scaling UP! H2O's Legionella Resources Page  The Rising Tide Mastermind Scaling UP! H2O Academy video courses Submit a Show Idea AWT (Association of Water Technologies)   Drop By Drop with James  In today's segment, I have another challenge for you.  Today's challenge is…draw a process flow diagram for your water systems.  Having a good process flow diagram will help both you and your customer.  The exercise may correct some assumptions you have or open your eyes to challenges you never knew existed.    Be sure to include chemical feed points, water meters, blowdown lines, valves, waste streams, pretreatment equipment, pretreatment equipment waste streams, boilers, cooling towers, chillers, closed loops, dead legs, pressure and temperature gauge locations, pH probes, controllers, heat exchangers, makeup lines, outfalls, and whatever else you may run across.  Feel free to make notes about frequency of equipment rotation, flow rates, temperatures, pressures, etc.  Lastly, hand-drawn diagrams can be just fine because ANY process flow diagram has got to be better than NO process flow diagram, right?  No need to get fancy if that will just slow you down and prevent you from making process flow diagrams in the first place.    2024 Events for Water Professionals Check out our Scaling UP! H2O Events Calendar where we've listed every event Water Treaters should be aware of by clicking HERE or using the dropdown menu.  

Agile, DevOps, TPS, TOC, Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. Is there a mental construct or latticework that connects these robust systems?In Wiring the Winning Organization, Gene Kim and Steve Spear introduce the concepts of the three layers of work and social circuitry. The book also explains the book's three biggest learning pillars: Simplification, Slowification, and Amplification.Business Beyond Borders: Impactful Insights for AccountantsEmpowering Accountants: Explore Trends, Strategies, Global Staffing & Impactful Insights!Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Have you ever wondered why some organizations consistently outperform others? And why, even when using the same tools and methodologies, some companies are able to leverage them to achieve success whereas at others they just become the flavor of the month?If you are curious about the answers, you won't want to miss this episode with Steve Spear and Gene Kim where we unpack what makes companies “great” and explore key concepts in their new book, “Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification”. Together, we peel back the layers of organizational innovation and problem-solving to focus on the critical – and often missing elements – for high performance.Tune in to discover the role that management systems and leadership play in shaping an organization's success, and the mechanisms that enable innovation, problem-solving, and collaboration across large, complex organizations.It makes no difference what you call it  – lean, agile, DevOps –  wiring your organization to win always comes back to the principles of good leadership.If you are a leader, an operational excellence practitioner, or simply someone aspiring to create and thrive in a winning organization, this is an episode you can't afford to miss.In this episode you'll learn:What defines a winning organization and separates great organizations from “not great” onesHow to navigate from the “danger zone” to the “winning zone” The three layers of organizational problem-solving and continuous improvement The critical role of leadership and management systems in creating conditions for successThe sociotechnical mechanisms of winning organizations: slowification, simplification, and amplificationThree questions leaders should ask daily to enable a profound organizational transformationLeadership behavior shifts to be more effective in wiring your organization – and team –  to winHit play now to discover how you can build a high-performing organization and wire your organization for greatness.BONUS: Register by January 17th to win one of 15 signed copies of Wiring the Winning Organization. Details here:  http://chainoflearning.com/8About my guests:Steve Spear is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is a renowned thought leader in the field of organizational excellence and high-performance organizations. Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and former CTO of TripWire, specializing in improving software development and IT management for high-performing technology organizations.Links:Episode webpage and book giveaway registration: https://chainoflearning.com/8Book “Wiring the Winning Organization”: https://itrevolution.com/product/wiring-the-winning-organization/Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevespear/ Connect with Gene on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realgenekim/ My Book: Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: https://kbjanderson.com/learning-to-lead/ Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbjanderson/Work with me: https://kbjanderson.com/Timestamps 01:30 Introduction of Steve Spear and Gene Kim03:41 Definition of a winning organization04:02 Understanding what high-performance is06:10 Disparities in organizational performance and the role of management systems07:53 Common mechanisms of performance 09:55 The three layers10:06 Social circuitry11:13 Capability and competency13:50  The socio part of the sociotechnical system14:05 Mr. Yoshino's paint mistake story15:49 Paul O'Neill's three critical questions for leaders18:50 The role of leaders in creating conditions that enable individuals to succeed19:07 How to move from the danger zone to the winning zone19:17 Slowification, simplification, and amplification21:29  Culture of learning and improvement through social circuitry25:30 How slowfication helps winning organizations30:24 The performance paradox and learning zones31:17 The importance of simulating disasters 33:03 Misuse of terminology and principles i.e., “lean”35:12 Interrelationship between management practices37:18 Lessons learned from the writing and collaboration process43:09 Steve and Gene's behaviors to be more effective in wiring winning organizations47:17 Breaking the telling habit

In the latest episode of People Solve Problems, Jamie Flinchbaugh has an engaging discussion with Steve Spear, the Founder of See to Solve LLC and Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Steve, renowned for his expertise in operational excellence and leadership, delves into the intricacies of problem-solving and collaboration. The conversation focuses on Steve's new book, co-authored with Gene Kim, titled Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification. Steve shares his unique approach to collaborative problem-solving, emphasizing the value of diverse perspectives to forge robust solutions. Drawing from his experience with the Toyota Production System and as an educator at MIT, he underscores the significance of creating learning organizations. A key aspect of the conversation is Steve's focus on intentional problem-solving. He stresses the importance of identifying and addressing critical moments thoughtfully, a practice crucial for sustainable and effective solutions. Steve also explores the sustainability and scalability of solutions in various contexts. He advocates for adaptable solutions that can evolve with changing scenarios, a principle central to his consulting work and teachings. Further, Steve reflects on the learning aspect of problem-solving. He views each challenge as an opportunity for individual and organizational growth, a perspective that has shaped his contributions to industries like healthcare and energy. For further insights from Steve Spear, visit SeeToSolve.com and connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/stevespear. Additionally, explore a detailed discussion between Gene Kim and Steve Spear on "Wiring the Winning Organization" at https://www.leanblog.org/2023/11/gene-kim-and-steve-spear-discussing-wiring-the-winning-organization/. The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition https://a.co/d/afNHMr2 Wiring the Winning Organization https://a.co/d/iajnlKn

Episode page with video and more In Episode 43 of the “Lean Whiskey” podcast, Jamie Flinchbaugh and Mark Graban begin by talking about each of our interviews regarding the new book by Steve Spear and Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization. Mark interviewed Steve and Gene for the Lean Blog Interviews podcast, and Jamie interviewed Steve for a forthcoming episode of the People Solve Problems podcast. We then shifted our attention to celebrating 100 years of Suntory Distilling by each pouring different expressions from the Japanese side of the company, Hibiki and Yamazaki. We also discussed the Jim Beam side, its progression and integration into the Suntory ownership.  We eventually jumped into our primary In the News segment discussing a detailed investigative journalism report from Reuters on the objectively poor safety record at SpaceX. The data is compelling, from a fatality to a coma, and eight amputations. But the safety rate is six times the industry average, coming in at 4.8 per 100 workers. Yes, space travel and doing anything breakthrough is inherently dangerous, but there's two arguments with this. First, the injuries are things like falling out of trucks and not related to launching a rocket. Second, there are numerous examples of doing inherently dangerous work with a great safety record. Alcoa, under the leadership of Paul O'Neill, is a great example of this, where not only is the work done safely, but with increasing profits along the way.  We explore the importance of leadership — through policy to system to culture — in the outcomes of safety. Elon Musk, as the leader of SpaceX, has signaled in many ways that safety is secondary. This includes a distaste for safety yellow on aesthetic grounds to statements that workers are responsible for protecting themselves. Both SpaceX and Tesla have a tendency to withhold reporting required data to OSHA, which might not be visible to employees, but it likely is to management. We make clear that safety practice and culture is the responsibility of management.  We wrap up this episode sharing fun facts about our hometowns, wishing everyone a happy holidays, and a final cheers to 2023! Links From the Show: Mark interviewed Steve Spear and Gene Kim in episode 493 of the LeanBlog Podcast, and Jamie interviewed Steve for a forthcoming episode of People Solve Problems Podcast on their new book, Wiring the Winning Organization Celebrating 100 years of Suntory Distilling  Mark's blog about the culture clash when Suntory acquired Jim Beam Jamie's selection: Hibiki Japanese Harmony Mark's selection: Yamazaki Distiller's Reserve NAS Japan Release and the Legent Yamazaki Cask Finish Blend  Kaizen & Culture Clash Between Suntory & Jim Beam? Reuters' investigative report on safety at SpaceX COSH's Dirty Dozen of companies with poor safety records  Examples of Paul O'Neill's take on prioritizing safety and being profitable here and here Please review us and follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform!

Episode page with video, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #493 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Gene Kim and Steve Spear, co-authors of the new book Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification. Joining us for the first time is Gene Kim, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher who has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 – He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, (now the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit) studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and family. Dr. Steven J. Spear, DBA, MS, MS is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and author of influential publications like the book The High-Velocity Edge, and the HBR articles “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” and “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today.”  An advisor to corporate and governmental leaders across a range of fields, he is also the founder of See to Solve, a business process software company. He has a doctorate from Harvard, masters degrees in mechanical engineering and management from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton.  Steve was previously a guest give times in episodes 58, 87, 262, 358, and 386. Questions, Notes, and Highlights: Gene — what's your “Lean” origin story or however you would frame or label it? Steve — what's a key highlight of your Lean origin story? “The ultimate learning machine” – Toyota Backstory on working together on this book? How many copied 2 pizza teams from Amazon and failed?? What puts some companies in the “danger zone” and how is that detected if it's not obvious? The andon cord was a way to speak up Steve – see, solve, share? A 4th step? See, safe to speak, solve, share? You write about recurring problems in a workplace. How do you think the behavior of managers punishing people for problems gets in the way of solving problems? The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in its 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more. This podcast was also brought to you by Arena, a PTC Business. Arena is the proven market leader in Cloud Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) with over 1,400 customers worldwide. Visit the link arenasolutions.com/lean to learn more about how Arena can help speed product releases with one connected system. This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network.   

Dr. Steven J. Spear (DBA MS MS)Principal, HVE LLCSr. Lecturer, MIT Sloan SchoolSr. Fellow, Institute for Healthcare ImprovementCreator, See to Solve Gemba and Real Time Alert SystemsSSpear@MIT.edu www.SeeToSolve.com Steve@HVELLC.comKnowing how to get smarter about what you do and better at doing it, faster than anyone else, is critical, a bona fide source of sustainable competitive advantage.How so? All organizations share a challenge. They're trying to coordinate people—sometimes a few, sometimes many thousands—towards shared purpose, somewhere on the spectrum from upstream conceptualization and discovery, through development, design, and ultimately delivery. The problem is, particularly at the startof any undertaking, no one really knows what to do, how to do it, nor can they do it well. All that has to be invented, created, discovered…figured out. So, those who solve problems faster, win more. After all, if your team and mine chase similar goals (or we face off as adversaries), you succeed (or win) because you come to your moments of test better prepared than I do. Since knowhow and skills are not innate, you won because you solved your problems, better and faster than I didmine, gaining edges in relevance, reliability, resilience, and agility.Spear's work focuses on the theme of leading complex collaborative situations, imbuing them with powerful problem solving dynamics. The High Velocity Edge earned the Crosby Medal from ASQ. “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside” won a Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award, and five of Spear's articles won Shingo Prizes. “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” is a leading HBR reprint and part of the “lean” canon. He's written for medical professionals and educators in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, and Health Services Research, for public school superintendents in Academic Administrator, and for the general public in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Fortune, and USA Today. High velocity learning concepts have been tested in practice, helping building internal capability for accelerated improvement and innovation at Alcoa—which generated recurring savings in the $100s of millions, Beth Israel Deaconess, a pharma company—with compressions by half in a key drug development phase, Intel, Intuit, Pittsburgh hospitals, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mass General, Novartis, Pratt and Whitney—which won the F-35 engine contract with its pilot, DTE Energy, US Synthetic, and the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force. The Chief of Naval Operations made high velocity learning a service wide initiative, and Spear was one of a few outside advisors to the Navy's internal review of 2017's Pacific collisions. He was also an advisor to Newport News Shipbuilding bout introducing innovative systems on the Gerald Ford, the first in a new generation of aircraft carriers. The See to Solve suite of apps has been developed to support introducing and sustaining high velocity learning behaviors.At MIT, Spear teaches Leaders for Global Operations and Executive Education students, has advised dozens of theses, and is principal investigator for research titled “Making Critical Decisions with Hostile Data.” Spear's work history includes Prudential-Bache Capital Funding, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the LongTerm Credit Bank of Japan, and the University of Tokyo. His doctorate is from Harvard, his masters in mechanicalengineering and in management are from MIT, and he majored in economics, at Princeton, to earn his bachelors.Spear lives in Brookline with his wife Miriam, an architect, and their three children, where he is on the board of the Maimonides School.Link to claim CME credit:

Shana Padgett MBA, BS Clinical Laboratory Science is the Vice President, Advisory Services at Value Capture, LLC. Ms. Padgett is passionate about improving the lives of patients and the organizations that care for them and has led change initiatives for more than 25 healthcare organizations during her career. A motivational leader and dedicated partner, she has a track record of exceeding client expectations and customer deliverables. She is a skilled facilitator, trainer, and coach, with years of experience leading organizations in the planning, execution, and sustainability of strategic improvement initiatives for quality, affordability, and service.Ms. Padgett has worked to improve care delivery systems across the continuum of settings and systems, including public, private, university, government, and socialized care systems. Her specialties include Lean Healthcare; Toyota Production System; Shingo Model Facilitator and Examiner; Six Sigma Black Belt; Operational Excellence; Staff Engagement; Patient Experience; Quality & Performance Improvement; Training & Mentoring; Change Management; Leadership Development & Coaching Vickie has a passion for collaborating with people to create learning organizations that deliver high value by enabling people to reach their fullest potential using system thinking based in respect for humanity. She started her career in manufacturing at Alcoa, considered one of the safest companies in the world, supporting the worldwide adoption of the principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS) as the Alcoa Business System. Here she had the unique opportunity to learn the principles of TPS directly from Toyota sensei while participating in the development of Harvard Business School's Kent Bowen and Steve Spear's seminal work Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. At the request of Paul O'Neill, then retiring Alcoa CEO, she transitioned to applying these same principles to the healthcare industry first at the Pittsburgh Regional Health Care Initiative and then at Value Capture, LLC where she is currently a contracted Senior Advisor. In addition to leading her own consulting company, she owned and operated a bakery business for over 10 years. Vickie has a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and Masters in Business Administration and Public Policy from Harvard UniversityLink to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release dateContact CEOD@bmhcc.org if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Why are we afraid when Jesus is with us? This weekend we continued our HEART & SOUL series as special guest Steve Spear shared about running for clean drinking water in Africa.Luke 8:24-25He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. “Where is your faith?” he asked his disciples.After resigning from his job and selling their business, Steve Spear and his wife set out on a journey to raise millions of dollars to provide clean water for the most vulnerable in nations around the world. At each turning point and step in his journey, he had to ask himself a simple question:Other than fear, what is holding me back from doing what God is calling me to do?Jesus leads us on a journey and invites us to follow. When his disciples set out on the boat, Jesus knew what was ahead, but they had to depend on him to get there. There are a few things that the disciples learned on this journey. Jesus calms storms.Jesus is with us.Jesus heals and transforms.But all of these truths and experiences turn on one important point:We never know what's on the other side until we go. Choosing to follow Jesus in faith means we do things we never thought we could do!

On this episode, I sit down with Steve Spear, a man who in 2013 ran from Santa Monica, CA to Annapolis, MD in 150 days (roughly a marathon a day). He also managed to raise over half a million dollars to help bring clean water to communities that need it around the globe. Awesome person. Awesome story. Enjoy.Check out https://www.teamai.org/ for more info on our endurance team!

Today, I invited Aaron Walker AKA “Big A” back on the podcast to talk about his experience when he went on a two-month Sabbatical in 2021.  As a business owner, Big A founded 14 companies over the past 42 years, and going on a Sabbatical was a difficult thing to consider. But with the persuasion of many of his Mastermind group members and his doctor, he went on a Sabbatical on November 1st, 2021, completely unplugging from everyone except his family for the rest of the year. Aaron has credited his wonderful team and his executive assistant to whom he delegated tasks for keeping his business on the right track while he stepped away for two months. I've always thought that a Sabbatical is just a fancy word for rich people to take an extended vacation, but it was so much more. Aaron Walker opened my eyes to what Sabbaticals are truly about. More than that, I learned that the strength of the business isn't due to the strength of the business owner; the strength of the business lies with the team that the business owner has developed. Bottom line: Aaron Walker will talk about his two-month Sabbatical and how it changed his life. Your roadside friend, as you travel from client to client.  -Trace    Timestamps:  Goal Setting with The “12-Week Year” [02:00] Events in Water Treatment [04:31] Welcoming Aaron Walker AKA “Big A” back to the podcast [08:00] Aaron's Superpower: Giving hard advice in a caring and tactful way [10:33] Deciding to take a Sabbatical and talking to the staff [15:15] Dealing with the struggles of being a business owner stepping away from their business [18:45] What is a good Sabbatical objective [24:36] Aaron's day-to-day while on Sabbatical [26:50] Aaron's advice to those who want to go on a Sabbatical [31:04] How did Aaron's life, work, and relationships change post-Sabbatical [36:03] Thinking On Water With James [47:21]   Thinking On Water With James:  In this week's episode, we're thinking about how sodium hypochlorite, or bleach, controls microbiological growth? What's happening outside the microbiological cell? What's happening inside? What are the chemical species causing this? How much time is required to get effective microbiological control? How does pH impact these chemical species? Does the “reservoir effect” soften the impact of pH? Take this week to learn more about sodium hypochlorite and its impact on microbiological growth.    Quotes: “I help ordinary men become extraordinary.”  - Aaron Walker  “My life's vision is motivation. Helping other people achieve their goals and dreams.” - Aaron Walker  “You've gotta say hard things often, (even though) these are things you don't wanna say.” - Aaron Walker  “I think we're designed to be in a community. Humanity is designed to have other parts around you that can supplement where you are possibly weak.”  - Aaron Walker  “I went into business to be able to have a lifestyle that I wanted to live. I didn't go into business to be a slave to the job.” - Aaron Walker  “It was very telling of me, as an individual, taking a Sabbatical, because I'm really having time now to reevaluate things that I was doing, that I wasn't really aware of.” - Aaron Walker  “Because we're so busy and clouded with activities, we can't get to a point where we can really think through what we want to accomplish” - Aaron Walker “You have to experience a Sabbatical on your own. No one can convince or talk anybody into doing it. It's a leap of faith.” - Aaron Walker “At the end of six weeks [the Sabbatical], I was fired up, I was rested, I had a plan, and I was ready to come back.” - Aaron Walker “Everybody can't do a Sabbatical initially, but you can set a target date to get yourself in a position to be able to do it.” - Aaron Walker “What I really learned out of the Sabbatical is really doing a deep dive with myself.” - Aaron Walker “I'm not where I want to be, but I'm a lot better off than I was.” - Aaron Walker “I was amazed by the depth of my thinking. I was able to think through what I wanted to accomplish.”  - Aaron Walker “We're so busy and so clouded with activities we cannot get to that level.”  - Aaron Walker “My Sabbatical in one word would be ‘Energizing.”  - Aaron Walker “We're a lot better off being an inch wide and a mile deep because the riches are in the niches.” - Aaron Walker   Connect with Aaron Walker: Phone: (615) 207-3018 Email: aaron@viewfromthetop.com Website: ironsharpensironmastermind.com LinkedIn: in/aaronwalkerviewfromthetop TuesdayNoon.Live with Aaron Walker ( Streaming Every Tuesday at 12 PM CST) Iron Sharpens Iron Mastermind View From the Top   The Mastermind Playbook    Links Mentioned: CWT Prep Course The Rising Tide Mastermind 244 The One About Water Treaters For Clean Water (with Steve Spear of Team World Vision) 184 The One Where I Interview My Mastermind Mentor (with Aaron Walker)   Events: International Conference on Biological Wastewater Treatment Technologies and Systems – June 2 to 3 in New York, NY NRWA In-Service Training – June 7 to 9 in Anaheim, CA World Vision Global 6K  Join Team Scaling UP! Nation or make a donation HERE   Books Mentioned: The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington Atomic Habits by James Clear

I've always said that the water treatment industry is the best industry in the world. The opportunities in the water industry are endless. If you work in the water treatment industry, you know that you'll be secure for the rest of your life. Businesses will always need water treaters, everyone will always need clean water. In today's episode, my lab partner is someone who's worked in the water treatment industry for 42 years: Jerry Angelili. Jerry started his career at Betz Laboratories, where he worked as a Sales Representative and Account Manager for 14 years. He then worked at three more companies before joining Chem-Aqua in 2007. He started as a Senior Engineer, responsible for technical assistance to the corporate sales force in selling and servicing prospects and customers in the area of boiler, cooling, and wastewater treatment applications. He would eventually become the Manager of Oxidative Technology, managing Chem-Aqua's existing and potential applications of chlorine dioxide ozone, and peracetic acid, and the Manager of Engineering until he retired in 2020. An expert in Chlorine Dioxide and its applications, Jerry holds two patents to his name: one for the portable water treatment system and apparatus (US 8211296) and another for the portable water treatment method (US 8226832), which were both issued on April 9, 2010. He was also a member of AWT, serving in the Technical Committee, specifically with boilers.  Jerry aspired to become a doctor when he was in college, majoring in Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. But lucky for us that Jerry decided to go into water treatment or we wouldn't have some of the technologies and industry knowledge we have today. Bottom line: Armed with 42 years of experience in water treatment, Jerry Angelili will share with us how we can embrace new technologies to make the entire water treatment industry better. Your roadside friend, as you travel from client to client.   -Trace    Timestamps:  CWT Prep Course [00:01] Submit your show ideas and upcoming events in water treatment [02:40] Introducing Jerry Angelili [9:27] Falling into water treatment [14:42] Working at multiple water treatment companies [21:33] Serving as a member of AWT's Boiler Technical Committee [24:37] Getting the most from your time when driving from account to account [29:19] Embracing the technological advances in the servicing, communication, and application of  water treatment programs [31:30] Jerry's patented inventions  [36:40] Jerry's advice to aspiring industrial water treaters [42:45] Lightning round questions [45:51] Thinking On Water With James [51:14]   Thinking On Water With James: In this week's episode, we're thinking about the order corrosion coupons are installed. What is the proper order? What does flow have to do with order? If you have great corrosion rates, why does order matter? If you have terrible corrosion rates, why does it matter? What is the science behind the order? Where would you find the proper order when in doubt? Would there ever be a reason to install one out of the standard order? Take this week to think about the proper order of corrosion coupons and why it matters.    Quotes: “I provided Betz with assistance without being denigrating. I tried to lift people up, if they did something wrong, we worked through it.” - Jerry Angelili “Get through a year; whatever happens, don't quit. If you can succeed one year in this business, you'll never have to worry about having a job again for the rest of your life.“ - Jerry Angelili “What we have available today, like the Scaling Up! H2O Podcast, and the different things you can listen to in the car, you'll have more positive information that motivates you.” - Jerry Angelili “There is always research being done for better and better chemical technology for water treatment. When you look at it over 42 years, it's amazing how much it changed.” - Jerry Angelili “All the advances in technology have been amazing and exciting to watch.” - Jerry Angelili “If you want a certification, the industry standard has become the CWT of the Association Water Technology.”- Jerry Angelili “You can say ‘I don't know', but follow it up by saying ‘I will find the answer for you'.” - Jerry Angelili “Worrying about something has no positive outcome. Action provides a positive outcome, not worry.” - Jerry Angelili   Connect with Jerry Angelili: Phone: (214) 226-8285  Email: jlangelilli@gmail.com  LinkedIn:in/jerry-angelilli-5aa6a19   Links Mentioned: Submit a Show Idea AWT (Association of Water Technologies) 244 The One About Water Treaters For Clean Water (with Steve Spear of Team World Vision)   Events: The Hang - April 14, 6:00 p.m. EST, USA World Vision Global 6k: Join Team Scaling UP! Nation or make a donation HERE.   Books Mentioned: The Bosses Club by Richard A. Gregory My Cross to Bear by Alan Light and Gregg Allman Please Be with Me by Galadrielle Allman  

On this episode, I sit down with Steve Spear, a man who in 2013 ran from Santa Monica, CA to Annapolis, MD in 150 days (roughly a marathon a day). He also managed to raise over half a million dollars to help bring clean water to communities that need it around the globe. Awesome person. Awesome story. Enjoy.Check out https://www.teamai.org/ for more info on our endurance team!

This week our guest speaker is Steve Spear for Team World Vision telling us about running in the Chicago Marathon to bring clean drinking water to children in Africa.

Happy World Water Day! We've been celebrating World Water Day since 1993, and this year we are celebrating in an extra special way. My guest today is someone whom I introduced on Episode 236 when I interviewed Reid Hutchison; it's none other than Steve Spear of Team World Vision.  World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities to combat poverty and injustice. They are also the largest non-governmental provider of clean water in the world. One of the ways they provide clean drinking water to families and children is by organizing a yearly event that we are going to talk more about in this episode: the Global 6K for Water. But first, let me introduce you to Steve Spear. Steve leads a team of 40 staff at World Vision, the largest Christian organization on the planet, engaging churches across the U.S. to make a difference for the most vulnerable children. Before that, he held a senior-level leadership position at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL for 15 years, and was the head of various pioneering efforts.  Steve has done many mind-blowing things for his advocacy to bring clean water to communities that need it the most. He ran across the country, from Los Angeles to New York to raise over $500,000 for clean water. In 2017, the U.S. Congress recognized Steve for his humanitarian work and as a role model for all Americans.  I'm also happy to announce that the Scaling UP! H2O podcast has created a team for this year's Global 6K for Water happening on Saturday, May 21, 2022, and I want YOU to join our team! You can learn more about Team Scaling UP! Nation or make a donation HERE. We'd love for you and your friends, family, and co-workers to join Team Scaling UP! Nation, but if you'd like to make your own Global 6K for Water team for your business/employees, please reach out to Steve Spear at sspear@worldvision.org. Bottom line: You can bring clean drinking water to communities that need it most just by putting one foot in front of the other at the Global 6K. We can bring awareness to this issue, and participate as a global water treatment community. Your roadside friend, as you travel from client to client.   -Trace    Timestamps:  Happy World Water Day! [01:11] Thinking On Water With James [04:00] Introducing Steve Spear of Team World Vision [06:04] Running across the United States in 2013 for clean water [07:23] Pushing on amidst the challenges [14:49] What does World Vision do, exactly? [17:05] What can water treaters do to help end the world water crisis? [18:46] Painting a picture of what it's like in communities with no access to clean water [20:40] Finding his purpose: bringing clean water to communities that don't have access to it [25:39] Why is it a 6K run and not a 5K: a distance of solidarity [26:01] How World Vision brings clean water to communities [30:00] How to sign up for the Global 6K for Water and get involved [35:44]   Thinking On Water With James:  In this week's episode, we're thinking about how saturated brine is then diluted during the softener regeneration brine-draw cycle.  Why is this?  On the surface, it seems oxymoronic to work so hard to achieve a saturated brine in the brine tank only to dilute it during the brine-draw cycle in the regeneration process.  What impact would using saturated brine have on the resin beads?  Operationally, why does it make sense to dilute instead of achieving the desired brine concentration upfront?  You've probably not even thought much about this one part of the softener regeneration process before, but take this week to think about it and the entire process.    Quotes: “When I got to Battery Park (after running across 14 States), there was just this overwhelming sense of gratefulness.” - Steve Spear “World Vision officially began in 1950, and we are now in about 100 countries, with 40,000 staff worldwide.” - Steve Spear “World Vision's goal is to serve the most vulnerable children.” - Steve Spear “The work that we do on the ground is done indigenously.” - Steve Spear “Sometimes, we take water for granted here in the US. In the developing world, we know the lack of clean water is the number one cause of preventable death on the planet.” - Steve Spear “Education becomes an opportunity, healthcare skyrockets because the base layer of water, which is needed for every other building block to move a community out of poverty, is taken care of.” - Steve Spear “One of the key things we do at World Vision that activates people is child sponsorship, putting a name and a face to the cause.“ - Steve Spear “I devote myself to inviting others to put one foot in front of the other to create a whole new future for children with no access to clean water.” - Steve Spear “6K is the average distance that women and children walk in the developing world to get water.” - Steve Spear “6K is a distance of solidarity.” - Steve Spear “Anybody can do a 6K; people run it, tons of people walk it.” - Steve Spear“ Water is life.” - Steve Spear “Anyone can do a 6K; I've done it with a 78-year-old woman with a walker.” - Steve Spear “World Vision is the largest non-government provider of clean drinking water on the planet.” - Steve Spear   Connect with Steve Spear: Phone: (630) 414-1300  Email: sspear@worldvision.org Website: global6k.worldvision.org LinkedIn: in/steve-spear-19aa71146   Links Mentioned: CWT Prep Course World Vision Global 6k 236 The One Where We Talk About Waters Treaters Changing The World   Events: World Water Day - March 22 2022 Technical Training Seminars - March 30 to April 02 in Cleveland, OH

In today's episode, we are bringing back Reid Hutchison of HOH Water Technology in Palatine, IL to talk about what YOU, as a professional water treater, can do to change the world. I know that sounds like a lofty goal, and maybe that sounds too high-reaching, but hear me out… industrial water treaters can change the world. Reid is proof that if you prioritize the right things today, you, everyone around you, and the world will be better for it. I'm also happy to announce that the Scaling UP! H2O podcast has created a team for this year's Global 6K for Water happening on Saturday, May 21, and I want YOU to join our team! You can learn more about Team Scaling UP! Nation or make a donation HERE. We'd love for you and your friends, family, and co-workers to join Team Scaling UP! Nation, but if you'd like to make your own Global 6K for Water team for your business/employees please reach out to future podcast guest and Team World Vision representative Steve Spear at sspear@worldvision.org.   Bottom line:  Reid Hutchison will tell us how water treaters are changing the world, one step at a time. Your roadside friend, as you travel from client to client.   -Trace    Timestamps:  Thinking On Water With James [03:27] What has changed since Reid was last on the show? [06:37] The enormous impact of World Vision's Global 6K [09:30] How can the Scaling UP! Nation get involved to solve the world water crisis? [14:24] How joining a Mastermind group can change your personal and professional circles, for the better [18:25] Lesson takeaways from the 2021 Rising Tide Mastermind Live Event [26:00] The positive ripple effect that happens when you apply the Temperaments to your communications [28:10] Lightning round questions [47:02] What you need to know about AWT, Temperaments, and joining World Vision's Global 6K for Water [52:00]   Thinking On Water With James: What is an acceptable water loss in a closed loop? In this week's episode, we're thinking about water loss in a closed loop system. What is an acceptable water loss?  Is it 10%, 5%, or even 0%?  How does the volume of the system factor into what size water loss is acceptable?  What is being lost beyond water with a leak?  What can cause a closed loop to lose water?  How do you know it's losing water?  Are there times when a makeup water meter may miss a low-flow makeup?  What things may be introduced with fresh makeup water that could cause problems within the closed loop?  What is the cost of the water loss?  Do you know the value of the closed loop's water in $/1000 gallons or even $/100 gallons for smaller systems?  Knowing the value may help get other parties on board to address the water loss, if necessary.  Take this next week to think about water losses in closed loop systems and what you may or may not deem as acceptable.   Quotes: “The World Vision 6K for Water: an event that raises awareness and money for clean water efforts in the world, and specifically serves people who do not have access to safe drinking water.” - Reid Hutchison “The World Vision 6K for Water allows people to move their feet and invite others, raise awareness, and raise money to help bring an end to the global water crisis.” - Reid Hutchison “It is called a 6K for water, not a 5K, because 6K is the average distance that folks who do not have access to clean water need to walk daily in order to get water.” - Reid Hutchison “Our biggest goal is to inspire people to participate in the World Vision 6K for Water.” - Reid Hutchison “By 2030, it is possible that the global water crisis will be solved or ended. The only way to reach that goal is to mobilize more people to engage in the effort to help millions of people.”  - Reid Hutchison “For those of us in the water treatment industry, it is a great cause to be involved with because it is personal to what we do and each person can make an impact.”  - Reid Hutchison “It has been an honor to facilitate a Rising Tide Mastermind group.”  - Reid Hutchison “We crowdsourced advice and crowdsource questions to move the ball forward for members of the Rising Tide Mastermind group facing issues.”  - Reid Hutchison “I Said This You Heard That instantly made everyone aware and alert to what they were saying and why and how people were receiving what they were saying.”  - Reid Hutchison “I Said This You Heard That was immediately practical and helpful.” - Reid Hutchison “I Said This You Heard That: It's simple. It's powerful. Everyone can relate to it.” - Reid Hutchison “As soon as you get familiar with the Temperaments, and how they may play out in your communication, everyone has extra grace or empathy towards one another.” - Reid Hutchison “We're solving problems and making the industry better.”  - Trace Blackmore “It's a lot easier to move through life with your own personal board of directors, which is why Rising Tide Mastermind is so important.” - Trace Blackmore   Connect with Reid Hutchison: Email: ​​rhutchison@hohwatertechnology.com Website: www.hohwatertechnology.com LinkedIn: in/reid-h-3a329431   Links Mentioned:  Submit a Show Idea Team World Vision  World Vision International Pure Water For The World World Water Day 122 The One with Reid Hutchison  123 The Other One with Reid Hutchison The Rising Tide Mastermind 117 The One With Temperament Expert, Kathleen Edelman 179 Another One that Teaches Us to Communicate Better with Others I Said This You Heard That YouTube Channel  AWT (Association of Water Technologies) AWT Technical Training Seminars   Books Mentioned: I Said This, You Heard That by Kathleen Edelman The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey  

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Spear about the characteristics of high-performance organisations and how leadership enables creativity and productivity. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3JR78dm Subscribe to our newsletters: - The InfoQ weekly newsletter: www.infoq.com/news/InfoQ-Newsletter/ - The Software Architects' Newsletter [monthly]: www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter/ Upcoming Virtual Events - events.infoq.com/ QCon London: https://qconlondon.com/ - April 4-6, 2022 / London, UK QCon Plus: https://plus.qconferences.com/ - May 10-20, 2022 - Nov 29 - Dec 9, 2022 QCon San Francisco https://qconsf.com/ - Oct 24-28, 2022 InfoQ Live: https://live.infoq.com/ - Feb 22, 2022 - June 21, 2022 - July 19, 2022 - August 23, 2022 Follow InfoQ: - Twitter: twitter.com/infoq - LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom/ - Instagram: @infoqdotcom - Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq

A year in review. The Safety Guru's Top 10 themes and ideas from our 2021 season! Get caught up with the ideas that will help you leave a legacy in 2022! Happy Holidays! Special thanks to our 2021 season guests: Nick Marks, Michelle Brown, Donald G. James, Kina Hart, Tricia Kagerer, Curtis Weber, Brandon Williams, Candace Carnahan, Dr. Tim Ludwig, Alfred Ricci, Dr. Josh Williams, Dr. Mark Fleming, Gardner Tabon, Steve Spear, Spencer Beach, Eduardo Lan, Dr. Keita Franklin, Jason Anker, John Westhaver, Dr. Tim Marsh, Glen Cook (Cookie), Dr. Suzanne Kearns, Dr. Robert Sinclair and Russ & Laurel Youngstrom. About the Host: Eric Michrowski is a globally recognized thought leader and guru in Operations and Safety Culture Transformations. A highly sought-after Executive speaker on the global stage, he has led executive training programs, coached the C-Suite, and connected with thousands of Fortune 500 senior leaders. He has been featured on TV, in articles, and Podcasts, hosts syndicated show on the premiere business podcast C-Suite Radio and has an upcoming ForbesBooks book to be published next year. His approach is anchored in evidence-based research and practical applications in Human Performance, Process Excellence, and Organizational Change. He brings over 25-years hands-on experience in Operations Management, Culture & Business Transformations, and Safety having worked across a broad range of industries. Across his work, he has achieved substantial improvements in Safety, Operational and Financial Performance, and Employee Engagement, always by incorporating Epic Cultures to maximize results and sustainability. Connect with Eric at https://www.ericmichrowski.com More Episodes: https://www.thesafetyculture.guru/ Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://www.propulo.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week welcome Steve Spear to the show – LIVE! From the GBMP Northeast Lean Conference!! Steven J. Spear is Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2011. Spear's research has been acknowledged with five Shingo Prizes and a McKinsey award from Harvard Business Review. His “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” and “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” are part of the lean manufacturing canon. His “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” and articles in Annals of Internal Medicine and Academic Medicine have been on the forefront in healthcare improvement. He's contributed to the Boston Globe and New York Times and has appeared on Bloomberg and CBS. Clients have included Intel, Lockheed Martin, Intuit, Novelis, Alcoa, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force, and the US Navy. As always - I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you get something from it! Make it a great week! Steve's contact info: Steve's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevespear/ Steve's Company Website: http://www.thehighvelocityedge.com/ Steve's Company Website: https://wp.seetosolve.com/ New England Lean Consulting is the Northeast's premier business consulting firm, helping small-to-medium sized businesses with strategic leadership and operational methodologies that help your company lower costs, increase capacity and win more customers. Our industry experienced consultants provide guidance with the latest business solutions that help you to grow your business deliberately and strategically in order to sustain a long-term competitive advantage within the marketplace. Paul W. Critchley, President & Founder of New England Lean Consulting: Company website: https://newenglandleanconsulting.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/NELeanguy Company page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/new-england-lean-consulting/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2sAIveqtNqE1fpRGXcdbXQ Paul's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-critchley-lean-consultant/ Lean Communicators Website: https://leancommunicators.com/ #LeanCommunicators --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/new-england-lean-podcast/support

During Week 5 of Chosen, Steve Spear from World Vision joins us to talk about a life-changing partnership with Northview for children in Ghana. Speaker: Steve Poe

It's our 60th episode! We're kicking off this fall race season with two Team World Vision veterans and legends, Steve Spear and Tim Hoekstra, as they share some stories from their years running multiple Chicago Marathons.

Director of performance excellence at Legacy Health Show notes and links: https://www.valuecapturellc.com/he48 Our guest today is Samuel Ashby, director of performance excellence at Legacy Health, an organization that Value Capture is pleased to work with and support. Samuel is a certified Toyota Production System leader with twenty five years of Lean, Six Sigma, and Change Management experience with various Fortune 500 companies. He is a proven thought leader that has delivered significant Speed, Cost, Quality and People Development improvements to the business. He has worked for Legacy Health for over five years now. In today's episode, host Mark Graban asks him about these questions and topics: You recently gave a talk on “Fostering a Resilient Culture” at the recent Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit from Catalysis, how do you define resiliency? How did you maintain resiliency as a child? Resiliency in the face of systemic racism? The role of empathy and openness as being an effective ally? What does it mean to be an anti-racist organization? Goals and measures? Resiliency during the pandemic for you and your colleagues? How do Lean principles and methods help, such as A3 thinking and respect for people? Goal: safest place to receive and deliver care? ZERO harm for physical, psychological, and professional safety Tell us about partnering with Value Capture on the Legacy Operating System Early experiences at Toyota?? Reflections and advice for others? Transferrable concepts, but not absolute The Rules in Use article by Steve Spear

In this week's episode geared towards leaders, founder of See to Solve, MIT senior lecturer and award-winning author Steven Spear shares his rich knowledge of safety success stories to help guide you towards tried and tested approaches to safety. Learn from real life examples, from Toyota's commitment to “coaching the coach” and late Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill's revolutionary learning culture to the U.S. Navy's smooth sailing operations thanks to a connected task force. What better way to improve your safety leadership and safety culture than to learn from the original trailblazers? About the guest: Steve Spear DBA MS is founder of SaaS firm See to Solve LLC, is a senior lecturer at MIT's Sloan School and is a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His work focuses on managing complex enterprises so they can get the maximum benefit of their associates' distributed and collective intelligence. He's author of a number of influential works including The High Velocity Edge, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" and "Fixing Healthcare from the Inside Today" both award winners from Harvard Business Review, and articles in Annals of Internal Medicine and USNI Proceedings. He's been advisor to the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force, a Secretary of the Treasury, the Chief of Naval Engineering, and the Chief of Naval Operations. His worked has influenced the creation and deployment of the Alcoa Business System, DTE Energy's operating system, and operating systems at healthcare at Intuit and Intel. He has degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. More Information: http://www.thehighvelocityedge.com/ See to Solve: https://seetosolve.com/ The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steve Spear More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/ Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://propulo.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In March of 2021, Gene Kim visited the mass vaccination site at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, which has been described by the press as a logistical masterpiece where over 465,000 Oregonians have been vaccinated as of May 2021. After a three-hour tour of the site, Gene Kim sat down with Trent Green, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Legacy Health and one of the organizers of the mass vaccination operation. Kim and Green discuss firsthand what it looks like to vaccinate 8,000 people a day and the strategic level of planning it took to produce and operate the mass vaccination clinic. Green reveals what those first few days of operation were like and how the site was able to increase distribution from 2,000 vaccines per day to 8,000 per day. Lastly, he discusses the lessons he learned during the rollout process and how those lessons can inform how to improve the overall health care system. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has helped the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative create its “Perfecting Patient Care System” and has worked on a few pilot programs with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.   ABOUT THE GUESTS Trent Green, COO of Legacy Health, focusing on innovation in Legacy Health's hospital operations and service lines, and responsible for Legacy Laboratory Services, Legacy Imaging Services and Unity Center. Green oversees the OHSU Knight-Legacy Health Cancer Collaborative, the LifeFlight partnership, as well as other ventures that directly impact hospital operations. Prior to his most recent role, Green served as Legacy Health's senior vice president, chief strategy officer, and president of Legacy Medical Group. He brings more than 20 years of experience in leading health care organizations, with specific strengths and accomplishments in clinic and hospital operations, strategic planning, business development, marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and finance.    Green's notable achievements include advancing a re-imagined Master Facility Plan for the Legacy Emanuel and Randall Children's Hospital campus; navigating a complex regulatory situation at Unity Center by providing decisive leadership and a unified approach to problem-solving, resulting in the successful restoration of status, cultural alignment, best in system performance on medication administration practices, and accelerated incident review and mitigation implementation practices. He also led and developed several of Legacy's most transformational initiatives, including the PacificSource joint venture, Silverton Health affiliation, Legacy-GoHealth urgent care joint venture, and the OHSU Knight–Legacy Health Cancer Collaborative, among others.   Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear's work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT Green's role as the Chief Operating Officer, how it compares to the Chief Medical Officer, and what are the other key leadership roles in a healthcare organization The strategic level of planning, human creativity, and problem-solving it took to produce and operate the mass vaccination clinic as efficient as possible Green's role and the various leadership roles at the vaccination clinic What the first days of operations at the vaccination site were like The major milestones Green saw as distribution increased from 2,000 vaccines per day to 8,000 vaccines per day Fast versus slow integrated problem-solving styles and theory building versus theory testing The lessons Green has learned during the COVID vaccination rollout process and how these lessons could inform how to improve the overall health care system   RESOURCES Trent Green's bio at Legacy Health Legacy Health Videos from DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe NPR: Half Of All U.S. Adults Are Now Fully Vaccinated Against COVID-19 Willamette Week: Oregon's Largest Vaccination Site is a Logistical Masterpiece. We Take You Inside. Tweet describing the vaccination site with “apocalypse vibe” The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim FEMA Region 10's video featuring Starbucks and Trent Green The Indicator from Planet Money: Why Hospitals Are Laying People Off The Indicator from Planet Money: Healthcare: The Pandemic's Financial Fallout Operation Warp Speed

This is the final episode in the series on the 2009 Book "The High Velocity Edge" by Steven Spear.Adam and Steve reflect on the fundamental thesis in the book: apply the scientific method everywhere to everything all the time. This leads to a conversation on how the ideas directly apply to software, deployment pipelines, the ideal flow, and applying the coaching and improvement katas.Free Resources DevOps Email Course Project to Product Email Course Toyota Kata Pocket Guide War & Peace & IT Pocket Guide Links Adam Hawkins on Twitter Adam Hawkins on LinkedIn Adam Hawkins' webiste Steve Spear on Twitter Steve Spear on LinkedIn See To Solve (Steve's new venture) Steve on the Idealcast with Gene Kim Steve's previous DevOps Enterprise Summit Talks Get InvolvedFollow @smallbatchesfm on Twitter and tweet me with your comments. Want a topic covered on the show? Then call +1-833-933-1912 and leave your request in a voice mail. Preference goes to to listener requests.Support the Show!Tell me about you in the listener survey! Rate this show on iTunes. Share this episode with your friends and colleaagues. Feedback is love, so send some my way.

Today's guest is Steve Spear.  Steve is the author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed book, The High-Velocity Edge. He is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is also a founder of a consulting firm built on the tenets of his book, and of See to Solve Corp., a business process software company. Expert on the ways that “high-velocity organizations” generate and sustain advantage, even in the most hyper-competitive markets, Spear has worked with clients spanning technology and heavy industry, software and healthcare, and new production design and manufacturing. Spear's 1999 Harvard Business Review article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” is part of today's lean manufacturing canon. “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” was an HBR McKinsey Award winner in 2005 and one of his four articles to win a Shingo Research Prize. Spear helped develop and deploy the Alcoa Business System, which recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating savings, and he was integral in developing the “Perfecting Patient Care” system for the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative. He has published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and Academic Medicine, and he has spoken to audiences ranging from the Association for Manufacturing Excellence to the Institute of Medicine. Spear has a doctorate from Harvard Business School, a master's in engineering and in management from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton.   Important Links: The High Velocity Edge See to Solve Andon Solution Gene Kim's IT Revolution   Interesting Excerpts from the High Velocity Edge Lean Healthcare Designing Systems to See Problems High Yield Problem Solving

Part three of a nine part series on the 2009 book "The High Velocity Edge" by Steven Spear.This episode tells the story of how Admiral Hyman Rickover demonstrated the four capabilities while creating the US Navy's nuclear reactor (or NR) program.Free Resources DevOps Email Course Project to Product Email Course Continuous Improvement Pocket Guide War & Peace & IT Pocket Guide Adam Hawkins' Links Website Twitter LinkedIn Episode Transcript The High Velocity Edge (book) Dr. Steve Spear's 2019 and 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit Talks on Rapid, Distributed, Dynamic Learning (podcast) Get InvolvedFollow @smallbatchesfm on Twitter and tweet me with your comments. Want a topic covered on the show? Then call +1-833-933-1912 and leave your request in a voice mail. Preference goes to to listener requests.Support the Show!Tell me about you in the listener survey! Rate this show on iTunes. Share this episode with your friends and colleaagues. Feedback is love, so send some my way.

God doesn't call us just to watch something, He calls us to step in to what He is doing. Often to step IN to God requires us to step OUT of our comfort zone, but it is those steps that our faith and trust in God grows the most. Today's message comes from Steve Spear of World Vision USA, we pray his story of stepping out of his comfort zone to do the hardest thing he's ever done inspires you to take action as well. Are you ready to take a step today? HOW TO SPONSOR: If you are watching this before 9pm on Sunday May 23rd and want to receive your reveal envelope next week at one of our physical campuses, please use the code for the campus you plan to attend. If you are watching this after 9pm on Sunday May 23rd please use the BPTYRONE code, you will receive your reveal by email. Text BPTYRONE to 56170 - or click this link: https://worldvision.org/bptyrone Text BPDOWNTOWN to 56170 - or click this link: https://worldvision.org/bptyrone Text BPSEMINOLE to 56170 - or click this link: https://worldvision.org/bptyrone If you are sponsoring a child please join our BP Chosen Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bridgepointchurchchosen

In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast Gene Kim and Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations, continue their discussion on the importance of leadership in large, complex organizations, especially enabling leadership training early in one’s career, and exploring why he views it as so important. Admiral Richardson also shares why radical delegation is needed more than ever, and provides tools and techniques for enabling it. Kim and Admiral Richardson discuss the important characteristics needed to integrate problems solving into an organization. And finally, they talk about the nature of the US Naval Reactors that are responsible for the safe and reliable operations of the US Naval Propulsion Program, why that warrants the command of a 4-star admiral, and what should ideally happen when accidents occur in complex systems. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge. ABOUT THE GUESTS Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world. Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers.  Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Admiral Richardson’s views on the importance of training leadership in the earliest stages of a sailor’s career Why leadership is so important Various tools and techniques for enabling radical delegation Important characteristics of the different ways that integrated problem solving incurs in organizations The nature of the function organization that is the U.S. Naval reactors, comprehensively responsible for safe and reliably operations of the US Naval Propulsion Program and why it warrants being commanded by a four-star admiral What should leaders in complex organizations do when accidents occur   RESOURCES Leadership Development and Balancing Creativity and Control with Admiral John Richardson (Part I) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte Navy Leader Development Framework A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 2 Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter by Adam Lashinsky How are the six-page narratives structured in Jeff Bezos' S-Team meetings? Flipped meetings: Learning from Amazon’s meeting policy by Stowe Boyd The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal, Chris Fussell, David Silverman and Tantum Collins The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim Michael Nygard’s episodes on The Idealcast Part 1, summit presentations, and Part 2 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow’s Wikipedia page The Idealcast episodes featuring David Silverman and Jessica Reif Part 1 and Part 2   TIMESTAMPS [00:00] Intro [01:24] Toughing up the training [09:37] Feedback from the fleet [11:00] Discussions with the instructors [14:03] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority [18:07] Designing for the next place [28:18] Reducing the cost of change [35:22] Configurations for failure or success [39:55] Tools for integration [47:39] How structure affects the dynamics of how organizations work [51:59] Gene reflects on integrated problem solving [57:28] Two domains of activities to use the slow communication paths [1:00:42] If these mental models resonate with Admiral Richardson [1:02:31] What point does the center get involved [1:07:47] Why the delegation for the nuclear reactor core is important [1:14:00] What happens when complex systems go wrong [1:20:37] Contacting Admiral Richardson

In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, the top officer in the Navy. Before that, Admiral Richardson served as director of the US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion program.   In part one of this two-part conversation, Kim and Admiral Richardson explore how the Department of Defense and the armed services can lead the way to respond effectively to the digital disruption agenda. Admiral Richardson discusses how he operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. He also presents his theories on how we need to balance compliance and creativity. And finally, he presents some amazing examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes, those layers of controls and supervision that may have crept in over the decades.   Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program program in his book The High-Velocity Edge.   ABOUT THE GUESTS   Admiral John Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the professional head of the US Navy. While in the Navy, Richardson served in the submarine force and commanded the attack submarine USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for which he was awarded the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Inspirational Leadership Award. He also served as the Director of Naval Reactors, responsible for the design, safety, certification, operating standards, material control, maintenance, disposal, and regulatory oversight of over 100 nuclear power plants operating on nuclear-powered warships deployed around the world.   Since his retirement in August 2019, he has joined the boards of several major corporations and other organizations, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company that operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America and delivers power to over 10 million customers.    Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple industries including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, US Army rapid equipping, and US Navy readiness.   Visit Steve Spear's Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Why high-velocity learning was so important to Admiral Richardson when he was the Chief of Naval Operations. How Admiral Richardson operationalized creating a high velocity learning dynamic across the entire US Navy. His views on the need to balance compliance and creativity. Specific advice on what leaders must do when the balance tilts too much toward compliance and has taken away people’s ability to unleash their full creative potential. Examples of how to strip away the barnacles from processes. Why radical delegations are so important. How Admiral Richardson came to believe that creating leadership communities and connections are essential. Where software competencies must show up in modern organizations.   RESOURCES Dr. Steve Spear’s episodes on The Idealcast Part 1, summit presentations, and Part 2. The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear. The Boeing Company Exelon BWX Technologies, Inc. Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7 Tao Te Ching - Chapter 17 Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 1 A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority v. 2 The Air Force's Digital Journey in 12 Parsecs or Less at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2020 Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande Fingerspitzengefühl The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance by Dr. Andre Martin The Key to High Performance: What the Data Says by Dr. Nicole Forsgren Dr. Andre Martin’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation: “The Shift: Creating a Culture of High Performance” by Dr. Andre Martin, VP People Development, Google Adrian Cockcroft on the Future of the Cloud Patton George S. Patton slapping incidents The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley A. McChrystal, Chris Fussell, David Silverman and Tantum Collins Navy Leader Development Framework Tombstone   TIMESTAMPS   [00:00] Intro [01:54] Meet Admiral John Richardson [04:00] Responding effectively to the digital disruption agenda [07:05] Admiral Richardson in his own words and his Act 2 [08:27] Meet Steve Spear [09:29] How Steve’s work caught Admiral Richardson’s attention [11:46] Admiral Richardson’s efforts to create a learning dynamic [19:18] A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority [27:01] What he does with leader who’s afraid of the concept [28:48] Contrasts between learning culture and compliance culture [37:37] Fingerspitzengefühl [41:03] Steve’s thoughts on compliance vs creativity [43:47] Leadership development and compliance control [48:38] Addressing near misses [56:29] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 in Europe [57:52] Scar tissue processes [1:01:22] Finding a balance with leaders [1:09:43] The story behind general Eisenhower and General Patton [1:14:02] The three layers of creativity [1:27:23] How technology changed a sense of community [1:33:30] Admiral Richardson’s working relationships in the Navy [1:42:19] Where the software capabilities need to show up [1:48:02] Navy Leader Development Framework Version 3.0 [1:51:22] Outro

Lesa is the founder of Lesa Nichols Consulting.Show notes: http://www.leanblog.org/399My guest for Episode #399 of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast is Lesa Nichols, a former Toyota and TSSC employer who now works with organizations through her company, Lesa Nichols Consulting.Today, Lesa shares reflections on working closely with the late Hajime Oba. This is the third podcast in a mini series, following my conversations with Steve Spear and with Hide Oba.In the episode, we talk about topics including:Lisa's non-traditional path to TPS: From public relations to the shop floorWorking with plant president (and future company chairman) Fujio ChoChoosing between being a "technical scientist" or a "social scientist" of TPSMeeting Mr. Oba and working with TSSCHelping find American expertise to learn fromBecoming a powertrain production managerKey lessons from working with Mr. Oba:"Managers must fight to have floor time""Safety is an assumed thing?" -- what does this mean?Don't look for waste, look for overburden (both physical and mental)Why is openly admitting mistakes such an important thing at ToyotaWhy Toyota's "soul is around manufacturing"Lesa was also a contributor of a chapter to the anthology book Practicing Lean.The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity and healthcare industries. Learn more.

TPS / Lean Consultant based in NYChttps://www.leanblog.org/397Joining me for Episode #397 is Hide Oba. His father was the late Hajime Oba, famous for his work at Toyota and the TSSC, as Steve Spear and I discussed back in Episode #386.Hide worked with his father at TSSC and also worked with him through the company H&M Operations Management, LLC. He is based in New York City. He says that his mission is to continue spreading his father's wisdom and I appreciate him doing so here with me on the podcast.I asked Hide to summarize his father's life and work and he then talks about some of the unique aspects of his approach.“Going to the shop floor was fun… his hobby.”Hide tells a story about his father telling Bruce Hamilton, “You should do Kaizen, too,” and you can read Bruce's side of the story here.We discuss the balance between asking questions versus pointing people in a direction. Hide says Hajime “never asked people what they should do,” but he asked questions based on his vision.Hajime saw TPS as “management engineering” — being very scientific about creating the right structure that allows you to create a kaizen culture. Hajime was also “careful” about the word “scientific” as it is meant to mean “continuous discovery and learning… understanding why.” Hide says his father was “addicted to learning.” Hajime aimed to always learn from the client.From the new 2nd edition of The Toyota Way (an interview with Jeff Liker about that is coming soon, by the way):“Oba said “TPS is built on the scientific way of thinking… How do I respond to this problem? Not a toolbox. You have to be willing to start small, learn through trial and error.”Hide also talks about how his father visited hospitals in Pittsburgh via Kent Bowen and Paul O'Neill.We also talk about why others have struggled to copy or emulate Toyota. “Stick to Ohno,” says Hide. Solve problems one at at instead of having a big program. He “never asked a company to start by creating a Lean / CI office, sitting and making presentations.” Hajime said the plant manager is the key person, and he would say,“Come with me and let's go through the process together.”Why does the idea of “challenge” not mean “asking people to do things that are impossible?” Why did he “hate giving a format for problem solving?”We discuss all of that and the idea of “respect for people.” Hide says he father taught that we should “respect humanity” — human life is limited and we shouldn't waste it… that's why we do kaizen. He also “saw a lot of waste in his final days” in the hospital.I'm very thankful that Hide can keep his father's work and legacy alive for all of us.The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity and healthcare industries. Learn more.  

In the final episode of the first season of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations, to synthesize and reflect upon some of the major themes from the entire season.  In Gene’s continued quest to understand why organizations behave the way they do, Fredrick helps connect the dots and points to new areas that deserve more study. They discuss the nature of knowledge work, including how software creation requires so much more conversation and joint cognitive work, and the challenges this presents. They also dive into the bodies of knowledge that are required as we push more decision making and value creation to the edges of the organization.  Then, Gene and Fredrick revisit the concept of integration and why it’s so much more important now than 50 years ago. And finally, they discuss why “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?” are two very powerful questions and what they actually reveal about people and the work they’re performing. And why this is all so important as we try to create organizations that maximize learning for everyone. BIO: Jeffrey Fredrick is an internationally recognized expert in software development with over 25 years’ experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide. His experience includes roles as Vice President of Product Management, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Evangelist. He has also worked as an independent consultant on topics including corporate strategy, product management, marketing, and interaction design. Jeffrey is based in London and is currently Managing Director of TIM, an Acuris Company. He also runs the London Organisational Learning Meetup and is a CTO mentor through CTO Craft.   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jtf  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/ Website: https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT The nature of knowledge work and how it requires more conversation and joint cognitive work and the challenges it presents The body of knowledge required in decision making and value creation for the organization Concepts of integration and why it’s important now What the questions, “Are you happy?” and “Are you proud of your work?,” reveal about people and their work How Dr. Thomas Kuhns’s work pertains to management models RESOURCES Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Dr. Thomas Kuhn A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Dr. Steve Spear’s episode on The Idealcast Dr. Steve Spear’s 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit Talk Michael Nygard’s episode on The Idealcast MIT’s Beer Game Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The DevOps Enterprise Journal Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore Command in War by Martin van Creveld Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day by Timothy Fitz Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart   TIMESTAMPS   [00:11] Intro [03:13] Meet Jeffrey Fredrick [03:54] Why conversations are important [08:03] Why conversations are more important now than 100 years ago [11:02] The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [13:08] Integration [16:33] The need for better integration now [20:18] What is information hiding and why it’s important [26:32] The pace of change moves the trade-off [31:41] Two important questions to ask [42:17] The system of fast and slow [48:25] Selection bias [51:07] Thank you from Gene [52:13] Jeffrey’s significant a-ha moment [59:45] Injecting change [1:06:24] Structure and dynamics [1:12:44] Command in War [1:23:39] Complaining about a feature factory [1:25:40] Standardized work and integrating feedback [1:22:21] Two elements of information flow [1:36:49] Insights on peer programming [1:43:54] Learning more and learning earlier [1:45:55] Is there something missing? [1:48:50] Contacting Jeffrey Fredrick [1:49:55] Outro

http://www.leanblog.org/386Joining me again for Episode #386 is Steve Spear, who reached out to share recollections of one of his most influential teachers and mentors, Hajime Oba, who passed away earlier this month at 75.I never had the chance to learn directly from Mr. Oba, but he is legendary in Lean circles and I know many people who were deeply influenced by Mr. Oba. I hope to interview more of them in the near future. My deepest condolences go out to Mr. Oba's family, friends, and colleagues.Here is a classic 2001 WSJ article that features him:"How Does Toyota Maintain Quality? Mr. Oba's Hair Dryer Offers a Clue" In today's episode, Steve talks about meeting Mr. Oba and how he learned from him as a PhD student. One story that Steve shares was about sitting at his desk, thinking about a problem, and Mr. Oba told him: "Don't think -- do!" Hajime Oba You'll hear more from Steve talking about the need to learn by doing and to test changes in an experimental fashion. It's not just "do" --- it's Plan Do Check Act (or Plan Do Study Adjust or even Plan Test Study Adjust). 

On this continuation of Gene Kim’s interview with Michael Nygard, Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, they discuss his reflections on Admiral Rickover's work with the US Naval Reactor Core and how it may or may not resonate with the principles we hold so near and dear in the DevOps community. They also tease apart the learnings from the architecture of the Toyota Production System and their ability to drive down the cost of change.  They also discuss how we can tell when there are genuinely too many “musical notes” or when those extra notes allow for better and simpler systems that are easier to build and maintain and can even make other systems around them simpler too? And how so many of the lessons and sensibilities came from working with Rich Hickey, the creator of the Clojure programming language.  Bio: Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte. Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world. Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.   Twitter: @mtnygard LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/ Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/   You’ll Learn About: Admiral Rickover’s work with the Naval Nuclear Reactor Core Building great architecture for generality. Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction. Toyota Production System’s ability to drive down the cost of change through architecture Clojure programming language Cynefin framework How to know if a code is simpler or more complex   RESOURCES Cynefin framework Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz "Why software development is an engineering discipline," presentation by Glenn Vanderburg at O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation," presentation by John Allspaw "Architecture Without an End State," presentation by Michael T. Nygard at YOW! 2012 "Spec-ulation Keynote," presentation by Rich Hickey re-frame (re-frame is the magnificent UI framework which both Mike and I love using and hold in the highest regard — by no means should the "too many notes" comment be construed that re-frame has too many notes!) "Fabulous Fortunes, Fewer Failures, and Faster Fixes from Functional Fundamentals," presentation by Scott Havens at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2019 "Clojure for Java Programmers Part 1," presentation by Rich Hickey at NYC Java Study Group Simple Made Easy presentation by Rich Hickey at Strange Loop 2011 Love Letter To Clojure (Part 1) by Gene Kim The Idealcast, Episode 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear LambdaCast podcast hosted by David Koontz TIMESTAMPS   [00:09] Intro [02:19] Mike’s reflections on Steve Spear, Admiral Rickover and the US Naval reactor core [04:33] Admiral Rickover’s 1962 memo [08:13] Cynefin framework [12:40] Applying to software engineering [16:06] Gene tells Mike a Steve Spear’s story [18:58] 10+ deploys a day everyday at Flickr [19:43] Back to the story [24:34] Why the story is important [27:35] When notes are useful [35:05] Too many notes vs. too few notes [40:00] DevOps Enterprise Summit Vegas Virtual [41:35] How to know if a code is simpler or more complex [47:23] A lively exchange of ideas [51:31] The opposing argument [54:20] Implementing items of interests [55:21] Back to the payment processing example [56:07] Case 3 [1:03:03] The challenge with Option 2 [1:08:19] Pure function [1:10:19] Rich Hickey and Clojure [1:15:01] Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” presentation [1:16:37] Exploring those ideas work at the macro scale [1:22:31] Immutability concept [1:23:58] The importance of senior leaders’ understanding of these issues [1:26:53] Outro

Seven years ago, Steve Spear completed his 150-day journey running across the United States, all in the name of clean water. This episode captures a beautiful conversation between Steve and LDR, as they talk about the call to run, reflection, and obedience.

http://www.valuecapturellc.com/he13 Welcome to Episode #13 of Habitual Excellence, presented by Value Capture. Joining us today is Steven J. Spear, a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2011. Spear has a doctorate from Harvard Business School, a master's in engineering and in management from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton. He's also the creator of See to Solve and is principal in his firm HVELLC. Today, host Mark Graban talks to Steve about his experiences working with, and learning from, Paul O'Neill during his time as CEO at Alcoa. Steve connects important dots between organizations like Toyota, the U.S. Navy, Alcoa, and healthcare organizations that are seeking habitual excellence. How can we learn and evolve rapidly in this era of Covid-19? Why does Steve say, "Yay science" when talking about scientific problem solving? They talk about this and more, in an episode that was recorded in mid-May.

In this bonus follow-up interview, Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear dig into what makes for great leadership today, including the importance of distributed decision-making and problem-solving. They showcase the real advantages of allowing more decisions to be made by the people closest to the work, who are the most suited to solve them.   Dr. Spear also shares his personal accounts of the honorable Paul O’Neill, the late CEO of Alcoa who built an incredible culture of safety and performance during his tenure. And Kim and Spear dive deeper into the structure and dynamics of the famous MIT beer game.   ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.   High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six. Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear Email: steve@hvellc.com Website: thehighvelocityedge.com   You’ll Learn About: Distributed decision-making Developing group leader core Safety culture at ALCOA The need for specialization in an increasingly complex world MIT beer game Feedback builds trust Episode Timeline: [00:10] Intro [01:36] Limitations of the leader [08:03] Taking the Moses example to the assembly line at Toyota [11:12] Developing group leader core [13:32] Back to the Moses problem [14:19] Gene’s two thoughts [16:01] Planet Money’s SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles [18:38] An Excerpt from The DevOps Handbook [20:57] Paul O’Neill’s job to set standards [22:35] Elements of rugged topography [23:37] Sponsored ad: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual [24:39] Setting context [25:30] The structure and resulting dynamics [28:00] Call it out early and often [30:45] Making everyone feel responsible [36:51] Safety culture at ALCOA [37:33] “If there’s a failure, it’s my failure” [38:52] Topography of the problem [42:27] Applying to the car example [46:50] Benefits of specialization in modern medicine [50:37] Complexity will keep increasing as time goes by or is it reduced? [52:31] The need for specialization will continue to grow [53:22] MIT Beer Game through the lens of structure and dynamics [1:00:14] Feedback builds trust [1:01:21] Dirty Harry’s final scene [1:03:08] Outro Resources: SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles on Planet Money Paul O'Neill interview worker safety at ALCOA Paul O'Neill on Safety Leadership Paul O'Neill Speech on "The Irreducible Components of Leadership" DevOps Enterprise Summit DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Jez Humble The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear “The Beer Game” by Prof. John D. Sterman The Idealcast EP. 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: a Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear The Idealcast EP. 6: (Dispatch from the Scenius) Dr. Steven Spear’s 2019 and 2020 DOES Talks on Rapid, Distributed, Dynamic Learning

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim brings you two of Dr. Steve Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations in their entirety.   In Spear’s 2019 presentation, “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection,” he talks about the need and the value of finding faults in our thinking that result in faults in our doing.    Spear continues to explore this lesson in his 2020 presentation about the US Navy 100 years ago, when they were at a crucial inflection point in both technology and strategic mission. It is one of the most remarkable examples of creating distributed learning in a vast enterprise.    As always, Gene provides exclusive commentary to the presentations. ABOUT THE GUESTS   Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.    High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.   Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache.   LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear Email: steve@hvellc.com Website: thehighvelocityedge.com   You’ll Learn About: The dire consequences when traditional retailers were late creating competitive eCommerce capabilities. Creating dynamic learning organizations. How fast feedback creates opportunities to self correct and improve in real time How the US Navy’s Battle of Midway compares to how organizations are responding to digital disruption today. Episode Timeline: [00:10] Intro [01:23] Dr. Steve Spear’s speech [01:44] What did I accomplish? [02:39] What did I discover today? [03:45] Start point with ignorance [05:21] High velocity learning [06:52] Courtney Kissler and Nordstrom [08:09] Steve’s examples of finding a potential solution [18:53] The Machine That Changed the World  [19:57] High velocity learning is mother of all solutions [23:13] Shattered Sword [29:45] Homework: Garner feedback and make it better [30:59] The importance of high velocity outcomes [35:06] Steve’s ask for help [37:37] See to Solve [38:30] Steve’s presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 [45:34] Digital disruption [47:17] Bringing the whole Navy to solve the problem [50:00] Combat information center [53:30] Greyhound [54:48] Innovation across a group of ships [58:47] Back to Midway [1:01:23] Contrast between Japanese’s and American’s Naval doctrine plans [1:04:17] Steve’s last encouragement [1:04:32] Gene’s two observations [1:08:32] Outro RESOURCES Dr. Steven Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 London - Virtual presentation - enter your email address to watch The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear Reed Hastings’ quote The Machine That Changed the World: Based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5-Million-Dollar 5-Year Study on the Future of the Automobile by Dr. James P. Womack, Dr. Daniel T Jones and Dr. Daniel Roos Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway: The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully  See to Solve Many of the concepts in this talk were explored by Trent Hone's fantastic book: Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945 by Trent Hone The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Jez Humble Greyhound

On this episode of The Idealcast with Gene Kim, Dr. Steve Spear talks about the primary characteristics of dynamic learning organizations, through the lens of its structure and the resulting dynamics, and how it enables those organizations to win and dominate in the marketplace.  From his 1999 Harvard Business Review article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” to his bestselling book The High-Velocity Edge to his monomaniacal advocate for the scientific method employed by everybody about everything all the time, Spear’s influence on the successful pursuit of excellence and perfection is undeniable.  Discussing everything from the importance of curiosity and experimentation, fast feedback, mission orientation, leadership, healthcare organizations, military strategy and organization, and of course Toyota, Spear and Kim explain why organizations behave the way they do and demonstrate why dynamic learning organizations are so successful. ABOUT THE GUESTS Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.   High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six. Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear Email: steve@hvellc.com Website: thehighvelocityedge.com You’ll Learn About: Explore how Steve’s mental model of dominate architectures, structure and dynamics can explain why organizations behave the way they do The conditions for organizational-wide learning that allows the achievement of amazing goals and to dominate in the marketplace How fast feedback creates opportunities to self correct and improve in real time The characteristics of a dynamic learning organization Episode Timeline: [00:08] Intro [00:21] Meet Dr. Steve Spear [04:47] Introducing the late-Dr. Clay Christensen [05:50] Working at a Tier 1 Toyota supplier’s plant floor [09:56] Steve’s dissertation and Dr. Clay Christensen [15:00] Dr. Clay Christensen’s involvement with Steve’s work [19:19] Creating a feedback generating experiment beyond Toyota [30:07] Why dominant architectures are important [33:22] The steering column example [36:28] What happens when the problems change? [41:45] The role structure and dynamics play with dominant structures [45:00] Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World  [51:41] The parallels in the commercial world [53:02] Change of dynamics in team of teams examples [1:02:07] The importance of bad news [1:14:44] Learning the dynamics within the US Naval reactor core [1:23:59] Reflecting on the discussion with Steve [1:26:11] How The Rickover Program achieved its goals [1:27:53] Conditions that suppress signals [1:36:57] Relating this to the COVID-19 pandemic [1:41:11] Finding Dr. Steve Spear [1:43:04] Outro Resources: The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity by Dr. Carliss Y. Baldwin and Dr. Kim B. Clark Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made A Difference by Theodore Rockwell Strategies for Learning from Failure by Dr. Amy C. Edmondson Dr. Diane Vaughan China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed. by Steven Lee Myers See to Solve by Dr. Steve Spear “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” -  Harvard Business Review "Facing Ambiguous Threats," by Dr. Michael Roberto, Dr. Richard M.J. Bohmer and Dr. Amy C. Edmondson

Episode 5 is with Steve Spear of Southern Arboreals! We talk about a little bit of everything but of course dive into his history with green trees and his future plans. SUBSCRIBE via Soundcloud, iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify!

Xytech’s Gregg Sandheinrich sits down with Visual Data Media Services’ SVP of Operations, Steve Spear, to talk about the initial challenges in shifting post production from the facility to the home (7:02), the need to secure the facility itself (10:55), the impact on making client deadlines (20:09), what happens when restrictions are lifted (28:00), and how COVID will push new post technologies forward (42:04).

This week Steve Spear from Team World Vision continues our A Look Under the Hood Series. The message this week is given in the context of running to raise money for clean water in Africa.

 http://www.leanblog.org/358 Returning to the podcast for Episode #358 is Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT and author of the book The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition. He's also the founder and co-creator of a software company and product called See to Solve. He's also the author of two outstanding Harvard Business Review articles: “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" and "Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today," both of which we'll discuss today. One of the themes for this episode is the evolution of knowledge. What does that mean for a company and what does that mean for an esteemed researcher and professor like Steve? Steve has a BS in economics from Princeton University, an MA in management and an MS in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard Business School. He was previously a guest in episodes #58, 87, and 262. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did! 

Steve Spear and Thomas Schramm join me for episode 43 to talk about their recent trip to Costa Rica and we dive into geckos a little bit as well! Follow Thomas -https://bit.ly/2Z9ClQK Follow Steve - https://bit.ly/2WmSi46 Follow THP - https://bit.ly/2ItmJRi

On April 8 2013, Steve Spear embarked on a journey that less than .001% of the population has ever attempted… In 2007, his heart was gripped by the fact that the world’s #1 cause of death, is not cancer, it’s not heart disease, war or smoking… In fact, this one single thing kills more than 4,000 people per day. That’s a person every 22 seconds… It’s something you and I likely take for granted and have thought about as much as we think about how much oxygen is available. It’s lack of clean water. And it is completely preventable. He knew to make a dent in the problem he had to create a movement. And to make a movement, you need a story. So in 2013, Steve and his wife Frances, did just that and over the course of 5 months, he escaped death by wild dogs, burned through 13 pairs of shoes, ate 6,000 calories a day and ran over a marathon every single day, 5 days a week, all in the name of raising money for clean drinking water in the most impoverished parts of our world. The total distance? 3,081 miles. From Santa Monica pier in California to Battery park, New York. So why would someone quit their stable job, sell their business, pack up their family and run across the United States? The answer? To create awareness and a platform he could use to raise money for the cause. In fact during those 5 months, he was on stage almost every weekend for a speaking engagement doing just that. Now today’s guest, as you may have noticed shares my last name and is actually my father. It was an absolute pleasure to interview my dad as he tells his story of growing up, becoming a pastor and his secrets of having a marriage that lasts a life time. If you can create a story that will move a person to action, you can use it to create a business, build a brand, make millions or change the world. Today’s conversation will show you how to do just that. So with that, please help me welcome, my father, hero and daddy, Steve Spear. As we upload this podcast, Ashley and Zach are traveling the world while they run their online business. If you want to work for yourself and travel the world, just leave a 5 star rating and a review on the podcast and send a note to support@zacharyspear.com to receive the “Free Before Freedom” masterclass - a course that has sold countless times for $997 teaching you how to build your own home based marketing agency. This is how Zach originally left his job, making $350 per hour within 12 months of starting with no experience. Yours completely free when you leave a review!

Today's podcast features a conversation about closing learning gaps between LEI's CEO Eric Beuhrens and Steve Spear. Steve is author of a few works key to understanding lean.  There’s “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Producing System” and “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” both in Harvard Business Review and his book The High Velocity Edge.  As you’ll hear, Steve’s work really focuses on how Toyota as one of a few real exceptional organizations competes on the basis of a management system that optimizes on the speed, quality, and breadth of problem solving talent.  He coaches these capabilities into organizations ranging from hospitals, industrial companies to the US Navy through his company HVE LLC, and teaches about them at MIT where he’s a senior lecturer. In this conversation chapters from his book The High Velocity Edge were mentioned. To read a pdf of those chapters go to: https://www.lean.org/downloads/The-High-Velocity-Edge-Chpt-1-4and5.pdf 

Early 2018 Stephen Bennett was a guest on The Sodshow. Stephen had, he told Peter Donegan, started a new journey working alongside Royal Ascot. Better famed for their race meetings a new garden show was about to give birth and the voices you hear are just 20 of the growers, nurserys, designers and trades that were there over that weekend.  If I'm honest, I ddn't have to do this but I've personally felt the pinch and the knock on effect of 2018's adverse weather and it's important if only to me, that new garden shows and those who smile always as I walk through the gates get a little of the availble air time. I'm glad I did and as with all of The Sodshow episodes, this one made me smile.  Subscribe to The Sodshow in iTunes, all good podcast stores and via www.sodshow.com  My hope, is that for the first time ever, you may get to hear that voice and what they do. That you may then like what you hear and maybe fingers crossed we will meet in 2019 at year 2 of Ascot Spring Garden Show and armed with a photo of that voice you heard and liked, support them.  As always, very much thank you for listening. It means a lot,  X Peter  Those I spoke to in order are:   Phil, APL Julie - Savill Garden Hannah - Cookes Garden Centre Sarah - Oxford Planters Steve - Spear and Jackson Drew - Ascot (no photo) Pip Probert - Peoples Choice Award Winner Colin, Hoyland Plant Centre Rosy Hardy - Hardys Nurseries Lesley - Muntons Plant Supports Lucy - Alitex Greenhouses Mike - Tibbs Plants Carl, Solid Oak Hardwood Furniture Hugh, John Cullen Gardens Stone Wood Services Ryan Alexander Alex, Woodland Trust Rupert, RSPB Vicky, New Forest Hostas Hemerocalis Theodora Keeling, Whichford Pottery Further information: Twitter: @sodshow facebook: The Sodshow instagram: sodshow

Steve Spear visits to share his story and challenge us to be a part of ending the clean water crisis in our lifetime. You will be encouraged and inspired that God makes the invisible visible. If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. Let's go together.Support the show (http://www.free.church/giving)

Date: December 21, 2017 Featuring: Steve Spear, DBA, MS, MS, Principal, The High Velocity Edge, LLC; Author; IHI Senior Fellow WIHI is pleased to present a Special Edition Podcast, Discovering Your Way to Greatness, featuring author and operations expert, Steve Spear. Steve Spear, DBA, MS, MS, is principal of The High Velocity Edge, LLC, which provides advisory services and has developed software that enables accelerated problem solving, particularly with distributed workforces. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won numerous awards. Dr. Spear is a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s Management and Engineering schools, a faculty affiliate at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is an internationally recognized expert on leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, and an authority on how select companies in various industries generate unmatchable performance by converting improvement and innovation from inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines. WIHI recorded Steve Spear’s remarks on December 11, 2017, in Orlando, Florida, at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 29th Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. Dr. Spear has a well-deserved reputation as an engaging speaker who equally draws on his own life experience and work with multiple industries to point out that better ways to do things are absolutely within reach. Solutions often reside in the new behaviors we’re willing to adopt. Steve Spear is passionate about improving health care so great care occurs as advertised, every time, all the time.   The podcast is one hour; we highly recommend that you have the presentation slides (posted on this page) handy for reference as you’re listening. 

The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-364 – Steve Spear – Across the USA  (Audio: link) [audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4364.mp3] Link MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening my friends.  Are you out on that early morning trail?  Or maybe the warm sunshine of a lunch-time trot?  Perhaps the star filled purity of a speedwork session at the track at night?  Wherever, whenever, you may be, Hello my friends and welcome to Episode 4-364 of the RunRunLive Podcast.  Today we chat with Steve Spear, not Steve Speirs of the 100 pushups app who we interviewed in episode 108 of the podcast, must've been the winter of 2008-2009.   BTW all those old episodes are on my website at RunRunLive.com.  I'm going to go listen to some of them myself and see if there isn't something interesting that I can curate for the members feed.  It's bit surreal listening to yourself from the past.  Time truly is a river. Today we are also going to squeeze in the 2017 Boston Marathon race report.  I think.  It's not the most exciting story ever told but it has become a tradition now.  I think this will be the 9th Boston report that we have shared together.  We started with my 10th Boston back in 2008.  What a long strange trip it's been. Anyhow – since the race report is long – I'll just jump right into our interview with Steve Spear who ran across the USA to help get clean water to families in Africa.  You'll hear me asking about how he did this because unlike Pete Kostelnik Steve ran the cross country route at a reasonable pace of 5 days a week and 35 miles a day.  I could see myself doing that.  I'll stick the race report in after that and we'll call it a day.  My Friday's have become increasingly pressed for time but I'll persevere! I took Tuesday, Wednesday off last week after the race.  I dug my old steel Fuji out, sprayed some petrochemicals on the chain and gears, pumped up the tires and went for a ride Thursday out to the rail trail.  That felt nice.  I went for a run in the woods in the drizzle and dark with Teresa on Friday for an hour and felt fine.  It was nice to run with her.  Kinda cool getting to talk in a relatively neutral setting. Saturday I met up with the running club to pick up litter on the Groton Road Race course.  Sunday I got to join the club run in the morning and it was good to not have to worry about a long workout.  The marathon gave me a lot of stress this year and I'm happy to have it in my rearview mirror.  Tuesday morning I got up and went for a run in the woods.  It was grey and overcast and easing into a patient drizzle.  I brought Buddy, the old Wonder dog for the first 20- minutes or so then went back out and did another hour.  There is something so peaceful and centering for me to run this loop.  Right outside my front door. Right on the other side of my vegetable garden is the trail head.  Buddy and I cut these trails.  There was nothing here except bulldozer roads and animal tracks when we moved in.  It was slated to be house lots.  Over the years it became conservation land instead.  Now, my house is the last on the cul-de-sac with conservation land on three sides.  The woods have not yet exploded in green.  We are in the April showers phase.  But, you can sense the arboreal tension in the woods.  Like a pensive skeleton waiting, on edge for the new leaves to burst forth.  Hen turkeys, with beautiful sheens of reflecting feathers dart across the trail looking for the perfect place to raise this year's brood.  Wood ducks bob on the gun-metal grey undulations of the pond.  All are ready.  We see the grey skeleton of winter.  They sense the green wealth of spring.  … Met the club on Saturday to pick up trash on the Groton Road Race course.  We spent a few hours and got 2 full truckloads of litter off the roads.  I suppose the most interesting thing I found was a plastic sandwich baggie with “Black Plague” and skull and crossbones written on it with a sharpie.  What do you think?  Some parent with a nerdy kid and questionable sense of humor making lunch?  Or more probably an empty bag of a high-powered weed?  Or, you never know, I'm now patient zero of the zombie apocalypse like I always assumed I'd be. Mostly it was Bud Light cans.  And flavored vodka nips.  The engineer in me wants to plot the beer can and vodka bottle distribution, do a regression analysis and lead an intervention to someone's door in Groton.  Or just wait at the liquor store with an officer and some handcuffs.  I guess if you are drinking on the way to work every day littering is pretty low on your list of worries.  But, like spring, the road is clean and ready for the racers.  We're going to have a great day.  I'm no longer Race Director so I think I may actually run the 10K! That's the way life is.  Life is change.  Life is winter.  Life is spring.  As Oprah says, we aren't getting older, we're evolving! On with the show! … I'll remind you that the RunRunLive podcast is ad free and listener supported.  What does that mean? It means you don't have to listen to yet another Blue Apron or Hello Fresh ad.  As a matter of fact, stop being lazy and go shop for your own food.  We do have a membership option where you can become a member and as a special thank you, you will get access to member's only audio. I'll also remind you that I have started raising money for team Hoyt for my 2017 Boston Marathon.  I would appreciate any help you can give.   The fundraiser is on Crowdrise (so I don't have to touch any of the money) it goes straight to the Hoyts and supports acquiring equipment and supporting others who want to participate like the Hoyts do.  … The RunRunLive podcast is Ad Free and listener supported.  We do this by offering a membership option where members get Access to Exclusive Members Only audio and articles. Yes, we are still working on setting up the separate podcast feed for the member's content.  Most recently I recorded and uploaded the first chapter of the zombie novel I've been writing for 30 years.  Member only race reports, essays and other bits just for you! Exclusive Access to Individual Audio Segments from all Shows Intro's, Outro's, Section One running tips, Section Two life hacks and Featured Interviews – all available as stand-alone MP3's you can download and listen to at any time. Links are in the show notes and at RunRunLive.com … Section one – nada Voices of reason – the conversation Steve Spear Chicago Tribune article about Spear's 2013 run across the U.S.:  Daily Herald article about the 52k Spear ran last year for his 52nd birthday in 2016:  World Vision article about Spear's transition from charity runner to World Vision staff member:  Information about the Global 6k for Water Spear is planning forMay 6th:   About Steve Spear In 2013 Steve Spear, Pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, ran from LA to NY to bring clean water to children and families in Africa. Steve roughly averaged a marathon a day for 150 days straight. His run took him through 10 pair of running shoes and 14 states.  Steve Spear is an honors graduate of Ozark Christian College in Joplin, MO. He led at senior levels at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL for over 15 years in a variety of pioneering efforts. As a Team World Vision Volunteer Running Ambassador Steve has completed numerous marathons, ultra marathons, a 2013 transcontinental run from LA to NY and personally raised over $500,000 for clean water in Africa. Steve and his wife Frances, of 28 years, have two grown children and reside in Carol Stream, IL.  About the Global 6k for Water Steve Spear, Running Ambassador at World Vision is encouraging runners and churches around the U.S. to take part in the Global 6k for Water. 6 kilometers is the average distance that people in the developing world walk for water — water that is often contaminated with life-threatening diseases. From fast runners to leisurely walkers, thousands of people will unite around the globe and run 6km to bring clean water to communities in need. Each participant's registration of $50 goes to World Vision's Water Initiatives. After you register you will receive a World Vision Global 6K for Water t-shirt, race bib, and medal in the mail. Map out a 6km route in your neighborhood or attend a bigger gathering at a host site on Saturday, May 6th, 2017. More information is available at:  Section two Boston Race Report - Outro Ok my friends, you have run slowly across the country and through the hills of Newton to the end of episode 4-364 of the RunRunLive Podcast. I'm running the Groton Road Race this weekend and the, just like that, it will be May already!  I've got to peel off some time to get my vegetable garden started!  I've been trying to get my old motorcycle on the road.  I got it registered but ran into a bit of a snag last night.  I put a new battery in an n no power! Now I'm going to have to chase around the wiring diagram with my multimeter and see if it's a fuse or a short or a ground… sigh… I'm not really designed with the patience for that.  I went and gave blood this week.  They've been pestering me but I needed to get through the marathon first.  My vital signs are all fantastic.  I had to do the mind control thing to jack my HR up over 50 for the nurse so I could avoid the red flags.  It took a awhile but they were able to get my blood out of me.  They have this sound track of 70's pop music that they play and it is a bit surreal.  I hear those songs and I remember specific situations, where I was.  For example building a fort in the rafters of my father's garage with my buddy Dave as pre-teens listening to “Ricky don't lose that number” by Steely Dan on the portable FM radio on a warm summer day in 1974.  Us with our Mad Magazines and Farah Faucett posters.  Now I've got to figure out what I want to do with this glorious summer laying before me like an unwrapped gift.  So far all I've committed is to climb some mountains with Teresa.  But, soon enough I'll get the itch.  I do love trail running.  I think I'll do some more of that.  What's next?  I don't know.  I've been trying to figure out what to do with my life forever.  There's no silver bullets.  Sometimes you have the opportunity to choose epic and worthy things that in some way define you and in other ways demonstrate a worthy path to endeavors to the world.  Sometimes circumstances knock you sideways and that unchosen path becomes the worthy thing.  Every day, every mile, you get up.  Whether your plan for that day works or something else happens you grind on with as much aplomb and reason as you can.  Then you get up and do it again.  Someday the crumbs of your life might lead someone else to something worthy for them.  And that's it, my friends.  Whether you think you are a leader or even an exemplar, people are watching you, the universe is watching you, get up and get it done today. And I'll see you out there. MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks -

The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-364 – Steve Spear – Across the USA  (Audio: link) [audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4364.mp3] Link MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening my friends.  Are you out on that early morning trail?  Or maybe the warm sunshine of a lunch-time trot?  Perhaps the star filled purity of a speedwork session at the track at night?  Wherever, whenever, you may be, Hello my friends and welcome to Episode 4-364 of the RunRunLive Podcast.  Today we chat with Steve Spear, not Steve Speirs of the 100 pushups app who we interviewed in episode 108 of the podcast, must’ve been the winter of 2008-2009.   BTW all those old episodes are on my website at RunRunLive.com.  I’m going to go listen to some of them myself and see if there isn’t something interesting that I can curate for the members feed.  It’s bit surreal listening to yourself from the past.  Time truly is a river. Today we are also going to squeeze in the 2017 Boston Marathon race report.  I think.  It’s not the most exciting story ever told but it has become a tradition now.  I think this will be the 9th Boston report that we have shared together.  We started with my 10th Boston back in 2008.  What a long strange trip it’s been. Anyhow – since the race report is long – I’ll just jump right into our interview with Steve Spear who ran across the USA to help get clean water to families in Africa.  You’ll hear me asking about how he did this because unlike Pete Kostelnik Steve ran the cross country route at a reasonable pace of 5 days a week and 35 miles a day.  I could see myself doing that.  I’ll stick the race report in after that and we’ll call it a day.  My Friday’s have become increasingly pressed for time but I’ll persevere! I took Tuesday, Wednesday off last week after the race.  I dug my old steel Fuji out, sprayed some petrochemicals on the chain and gears, pumped up the tires and went for a ride Thursday out to the rail trail.  That felt nice.  I went for a run in the woods in the drizzle and dark with Teresa on Friday for an hour and felt fine.  It was nice to run with her.  Kinda cool getting to talk in a relatively neutral setting. Saturday I met up with the running club to pick up litter on the Groton Road Race course.  Sunday I got to join the club run in the morning and it was good to not have to worry about a long workout.  The marathon gave me a lot of stress this year and I’m happy to have it in my rearview mirror.  Tuesday morning I got up and went for a run in the woods.  It was grey and overcast and easing into a patient drizzle.  I brought Buddy, the old Wonder dog for the first 20- minutes or so then went back out and did another hour.  There is something so peaceful and centering for me to run this loop.  Right outside my front door. Right on the other side of my vegetable garden is the trail head.  Buddy and I cut these trails.  There was nothing here except bulldozer roads and animal tracks when we moved in.  It was slated to be house lots.  Over the years it became conservation land instead.  Now, my house is the last on the cul-de-sac with conservation land on three sides.  The woods have not yet exploded in green.  We are in the April showers phase.  But, you can sense the arboreal tension in the woods.  Like a pensive skeleton waiting, on edge for the new leaves to burst forth.  Hen turkeys, with beautiful sheens of reflecting feathers dart across the trail looking for the perfect place to raise this year’s brood.  Wood ducks bob on the gun-metal grey undulations of the pond.  All are ready.  We see the grey skeleton of winter.  They sense the green wealth of spring.  … Met the club on Saturday to pick up trash on the Groton Road Race course.  We spent a few hours and got 2 full truckloads of litter off the roads.  I suppose the most interesting thing I found was a plastic sandwich baggie with “Black Plague” and skull and crossbones written on it with a sharpie.  What do you think?  Some parent with a nerdy kid and questionable sense of humor making lunch?  Or more probably an empty bag of a high-powered weed?  Or, you never know, I’m now patient zero of the zombie apocalypse like I always assumed I’d be. Mostly it was Bud Light cans.  And flavored vodka nips.  The engineer in me wants to plot the beer can and vodka bottle distribution, do a regression analysis and lead an intervention to someone’s door in Groton.  Or just wait at the liquor store with an officer and some handcuffs.  I guess if you are drinking on the way to work every day littering is pretty low on your list of worries.  But, like spring, the road is clean and ready for the racers.  We’re going to have a great day.  I’m no longer Race Director so I think I may actually run the 10K! That’s the way life is.  Life is change.  Life is winter.  Life is spring.  As Oprah says, we aren’t getting older, we’re evolving! On with the show! … I’ll remind you that the RunRunLive podcast is ad free and listener supported.  What does that mean? It means you don’t have to listen to yet another Blue Apron or Hello Fresh ad.  As a matter of fact, stop being lazy and go shop for your own food.  We do have a membership option where you can become a member and as a special thank you, you will get access to member’s only audio. I’ll also remind you that I have started raising money for team Hoyt for my 2017 Boston Marathon.  I would appreciate any help you can give.   The fundraiser is on Crowdrise (so I don’t have to touch any of the money) it goes straight to the Hoyts and supports acquiring equipment and supporting others who want to participate like the Hoyts do.  … The RunRunLive podcast is Ad Free and listener supported.  We do this by offering a membership option where members get Access to Exclusive Members Only audio and articles. Yes, we are still working on setting up the separate podcast feed for the member’s content.  Most recently I recorded and uploaded the first chapter of the zombie novel I’ve been writing for 30 years.  Member only race reports, essays and other bits just for you! Exclusive Access to Individual Audio Segments from all Shows Intro’s, Outro’s, Section One running tips, Section Two life hacks and Featured Interviews – all available as stand-alone MP3’s you can download and listen to at any time. Links are in the show notes and at RunRunLive.com … Section one – nada Voices of reason – the conversation Steve Spear Chicago Tribune article about Spear's 2013 run across the U.S.:  Daily Herald article about the 52k Spear ran last year for his 52nd birthday in 2016:  World Vision article about Spear's transition from charity runner to World Vision staff member:  Information about the Global 6k for Water Spear is planning forMay 6th:   About Steve Spear In 2013 Steve Spear, Pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, ran from LA to NY to bring clean water to children and families in Africa. Steve roughly averaged a marathon a day for 150 days straight. His run took him through 10 pair of running shoes and 14 states.  Steve Spear is an honors graduate of Ozark Christian College in Joplin, MO. He led at senior levels at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL for over 15 years in a variety of pioneering efforts. As a Team World Vision Volunteer Running Ambassador Steve has completed numerous marathons, ultra marathons, a 2013 transcontinental run from LA to NY and personally raised over $500,000 for clean water in Africa. Steve and his wife Frances, of 28 years, have two grown children and reside in Carol Stream, IL.  About the Global 6k for Water Steve Spear, Running Ambassador at World Vision is encouraging runners and churches around the U.S. to take part in the Global 6k for Water. 6 kilometers is the average distance that people in the developing world walk for water — water that is often contaminated with life-threatening diseases. From fast runners to leisurely walkers, thousands of people will unite around the globe and run 6km to bring clean water to communities in need. Each participant's registration of $50 goes to World Vision's Water Initiatives. After you register you will receive a World Vision Global 6K for Water t-shirt, race bib, and medal in the mail. Map out a 6km route in your neighborhood or attend a bigger gathering at a host site on Saturday, May 6th, 2017. More information is available at:  Section two Boston Race Report - Outro Ok my friends, you have run slowly across the country and through the hills of Newton to the end of episode 4-364 of the RunRunLive Podcast. I’m running the Groton Road Race this weekend and the, just like that, it will be May already!  I’ve got to peel off some time to get my vegetable garden started!  I’ve been trying to get my old motorcycle on the road.  I got it registered but ran into a bit of a snag last night.  I put a new battery in an n no power! Now I’m going to have to chase around the wiring diagram with my multimeter and see if it’s a fuse or a short or a ground… sigh… I’m not really designed with the patience for that.  I went and gave blood this week.  They’ve been pestering me but I needed to get through the marathon first.  My vital signs are all fantastic.  I had to do the mind control thing to jack my HR up over 50 for the nurse so I could avoid the red flags.  It took a awhile but they were able to get my blood out of me.  They have this sound track of 70’s pop music that they play and it is a bit surreal.  I hear those songs and I remember specific situations, where I was.  For example building a fort in the rafters of my father’s garage with my buddy Dave as pre-teens listening to “Ricky don’t lose that number” by Steely Dan on the portable FM radio on a warm summer day in 1974.  Us with our Mad Magazines and Farah Faucett posters.  Now I’ve got to figure out what I want to do with this glorious summer laying before me like an unwrapped gift.  So far all I’ve committed is to climb some mountains with Teresa.  But, soon enough I’ll get the itch.  I do love trail running.  I think I’ll do some more of that.  What’s next?  I don’t know.  I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my life forever.  There’s no silver bullets.  Sometimes you have the opportunity to choose epic and worthy things that in some way define you and in other ways demonstrate a worthy path to endeavors to the world.  Sometimes circumstances knock you sideways and that unchosen path becomes the worthy thing.  Every day, every mile, you get up.  Whether your plan for that day works or something else happens you grind on with as much aplomb and reason as you can.  Then you get up and do it again.  Someday the crumbs of your life might lead someone else to something worthy for them.  And that’s it, my friends.  Whether you think you are a leader or even an exemplar, people are watching you, the universe is watching you, get up and get it done today. And I’ll see you out there. MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks -

Steve Spear shares his story of going from the couch to running across America to raise funds for clean drinking water.Support the show (http://www.free.church/giving)

http://leanblog.org/audio62 Last week was an amazing week of learning and networking. I was in Dallas for the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (as I wrote about). As I mentioned yesterday, it was also my wife's five year reunion from her MIT master's program. As I also mentioned, I nerded out and sat in on a number of lectures that were part of the weekend.I'll also blog later about Steve Spear's lecture (you likely know him from the Lean community), but I also really enjoyed a lecture by MIT professor Zeynep Ton, from the Sloan School of Management (she's formerly of HBS... and also an industrial engineer, like me). Prof. Ton gave an engaging lecture on her book The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. I had heard of the book but hadn't yet gotten to the Kindle sample that I downloaded, yet alone the full book. The Kindle version is only $5.99, by the way, or it's free if you have a "Kindle Unlimited" membership. I've finally read the book and I highly recommend it. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio61 My wife and I were in Boston over the weekend, as it was her fifth reunion from her MIT master’s program. I’m also an alum, but was considered a “guest” since I graduated 16 years ago from my program and you don’t have to have an MIT degree to know 16 divided by 5 is not an integer. Being MIT, the reunion wasn’t just about parties (and it’s not a homecoming weekend with a football game, as my Northwestern 20th reunion will be this fall). The reunion was also full of lectures by alumni and notable faculty. I’ll be blogging soon about lectures by MIT Sloan professors Steve Spear (check out my podcasts with him) and Zeynep Ton (I’m reading her book The Good Jobs Strategy now and hope she’ll be a podcast guest too). A few things caught my eye on the Boston Herald and Boston Globe on Saturday. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Jeff and Jonny talk with Steve Spear, a former Willow Creek pastoral staff member, and current TEAM World Vision volunteer who is running across America to raise 1.5 million dollars to provide clean water for life to an African community of 30 thousand people. Steve is in West Texas as this is recorded, and just completed a 30 mile day, most through a dust storm!